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Discover floral wonders both romantic and gothic in beautiful artwork of roses in bouquets, botanicals, bunches and rose inspired art that spans the Age of Enlightenment to today at Galaudet Gallery’s Winter Art Show Choix Roses: les Deux: Beauty and Bouquets February 8—May 20, 2018.   Enjoy artwork for viewing and for sale that holds symbols of faith and liberty while raising contemporary questions about beauty from artists like Pierre Redouté  and Jan van Huysum  Have fun with surprise “rose” inspired art.  All can be found in the four spacious rooms of Galaudet Gallery’s welcoming Victorian mansion at 618 S. Farwell in downtown Eau Claire, WI.

Choix Roses: les Deux delivers flowers to freshen our winter, bringing to mind warmer times of the year and offering a wonderful survey of art containing different kinds of roses in unique floral arrangements and new ways to define beauty by looking at a rose’s life and our liberties.  Both Pierre Redouté of French fame and master floral Dutch artist, Jan van Huysum took years to complete these bouquets, capturing a real flower’s “lifetime”—from bud, to flower, to demise—seeing beauty in each stage of life hundreds of years before today’s artists rediscovered these ideas. An overripe flower at the height of its power of scent also showing its transience is quite contemporary since it phenomenally pushes the boundaries of what is called “beautiful”.  Filled with Age of Enlightenment symbols of faith and liberty, both artists’ poetics of beauty make these bouquets seem new and fresh, gothic and subversive—overturning traditional definitions of beauty still today.

“Choix Roses: les Deux connects with Galaudet Gallery’s Holiday Show, but this is more than just pretty flowers, these paintings are amazingly beautiful, but I have also enjoyed discovering the hidden symbols and translating their meanings into my life.  I just looked at a Huysum piece again this morning and found something new to enjoy.”  Co-owner of Galaudet Gallery Mike Milewski explains.

Mike’s sister and co-owner of the gallery Vicki Milewski adds, “les Deux  goes deeper into our sense of beauty; these bouquets and roses work as an authentic vision of our world today—beautiful yes, but also embracing all parts of this world as beautiful too—almost a beauty of diversity, maybe a diversity of liberty.”

Choix Roses: les Deux begins Galaudet Gallery’s Year of the Back of Beyond with shows influenced by Edward Abbey’s insistence that we need to go into the “backlands, the back of beyond” to places where we can be our authentic selves, where we have liberty to live our dreams or just get a little dirt on us.  The artists in Choix Roses work in the “backlands” embracing nature and transforming our sense of beauty through suggesting that the everyday is beautiful, disorder can be beautiful and aging is beautiful.  This is why Galaudet Gallery is reimaging the Arts and Crafts Movement for the 21st Century--bringing beautiful, well made items and art into homes and offices to enable new perspectives on moments in our lives that are beautiful—moments that we might take for granted or see as mundane work instead of the backlands that help open our hearts and minds to our own definition of liberty, our own value of beauty.

So take some time this winter and early spring to stop into Galaudet Gallery and smell the roses with new eyes. Galaudet Gallery is typically open every day noon—8pm during our exhibition runs.