Luzia Simons began her most distinctive series in 1996, titled Stockage. Since then, she has tirelessly developed new pictorial modalities, for which she scans rigorously arranged tulips reminiscent of Flemish Barogue still lifes. In Simons’s work, the tulip is a metaphor for migration, cultural transfer, and transience. The artist develops a unique perspective on this emblematic flower, which today is considered typically Dutch. In fact, however, it originated in the steppes of Kazakhstan, from where it arrived at the court of the Ottoman Empire and became the symbol of Constantinople, now Istanbul. In the seventeenth century, it reached Europe as an object of luxury and prestige, where tulip bulbs became objects of speculation, culminating in the crash of the Amsterdam Tulip Exchange. It is this multi-cultural cultural transfer, symbolized by the tulip, that is the focus of Simons’s artistic production as a socio-cultural symbol of exchange and integration.

In Luzia Simons’s work, one experiences a symbiosis of components of a world order that, until 2020, was characterized by globalization. Today it has become clearer that we all live in a world that, despite the imposed geographical distance, is more densely interconnected. My world is your world, my water is your water, my air is your air.