Art Basel Paris Public Program

On the occasion of Art Basel Paris 2025, Thomas Houseago's monumental Flower & Death (2018/2024, cast 2025) will be installed outside the Grand Palais, presented by Lévy Gorvy Dayan and Xavier Hufkens.

Towering and totemic, the tin bronze sculpture embodies the artist's ongoing exploration of vitality and mortality. Conceived in 2018 as a tribute to his late father and later recast in bronze after a period of personal transformation, the work retains the vigorous textures of its making. One side reveals a colossal flower, symbolizing renewal, while the reverse exposes a skeletal figure, crowned yet hollowed, both regal and fragile. This duality—between growth and decay, beauty and transience—lies at the heart of Houseago's practice, in which myth, archetype, and the human condition are distilled into monumental yet vulnerable presences. At once celebratory and elegiac, Flower & Death stages a profound confrontation with life's cyclical nature, resonating with both strength and change.