Porcelain Garden: Vladimir Kanevsky at The Frick Collection
Installation of Floral Sculptures Celebrates the Frick’s Reopening and Pays Tribute to the Museum’s Original 1935 Debut
April 17 through October 6, 2025
New York, NY (April 14, 2025) — In honor of the reopening of The Frick Collection’s renovated Fifth Avenue buildings on April 17, 2025, the museum presents an installation of commissioned porcelain sculptures throughout its restored and newly built galleries. The display pays homage to a historical detail from the Frick’s original debut, which featured carefully curated floral arrangements—personally selected by Helen Clay Frick, daughter of the museum’s founder—that enhanced key galleries when they were unveiled to the public in December 1935. Inspired by her vision, this tradition is now reimagined with an installation of porcelain sculptures by artist Vladimir Kanevsky (b. 1951, Ukraine). Shown on both levels of the original Frick mansion, including in a suite of new second-floor galleries open to the public for the first time, the nineteen lifelike installations by Kanevsky will remain on view for six months.
“As we reopen the Frick after a five-year closure, it felt only fitting to celebrate the occasion in a similar fashion to the 1935 opening,” stated Xavier F. Salomon, Deputy Director and Peter Jay Sharp Chief Curator, who organized the installation. “Vladimir Kanevsky’s exquisite porcelain creations allow us to honor this tradition—along with the museum’s important collections of historic porcelain and ceramics. His artistry bridges past and present, echoing the museum’s longstanding dedication to beauty and innovation.”
Adds Kanevsky, “It is an honor to have my work featured during and beyond the Frick’s reopening celebrations. The museum, both presently and throughout its history, is an endless source of inspiration.”
In 1935, the museum’s West Gallery, for example, featured a large vase of thirty-six American Beauty roses. The now-iconic Fragonard Room held lilies of the valley, while yellow roses were placed in the Library Gallery. In some cases, flowers were chosen based on a connection to specific works of art, such as a bowl of a dozen anthuriums placed under Titian’s Portrait of a Man in a Red Hat, echoing the color and shape of the subject’s titular headwear. Kanevsky’s installation, organized in collaboration with the Frick’s curatorial team over the past three years, features sculptures similarly installed in strategic locations throughout the museum, drawing connections between nature, art, and history. (In deference to contemporary conservation practices, fresh flowers are no longer displayed in the galleries.)
In only two cases—camelias in the Library and the lilies of the valley in the Boucher Room—has Kanevsky replicated Helen Clay Frick’s choices for the 1935 opening. Elsewhere, the artist has emulated her creative spirit, with the plants and flowers selected often connecting in new ways to specific works of art. For instance, the pomegranate tree in the Gold-Grounds Room is a tribute to a plant whose fruits are frequently represented in early Italian paintings and would have been well known by the artists represented in this gallery. A large, wild artichoke plant under Giovanni Bellini’s St. Francis in the Desert is meant to conjure the wilderness of the saint’s retreat at La Verna. In other cases, ceramic pieces from the Frick’s holdings are used to contain Kanevsky’s works, such as a large porcelain lemon tree shown in the Garden Court within a faience planter (ca. 1680, Nevers, France) originally designed to hold and display real citrus trees.
On the Frick’s second floor, now open to the public for the first time, Kanevsky’s porcelain flora inhabit some of what were once the Frick family’s most private rooms. Nowhere is this more poignant than in the Walnut Room, formerly Henry Clay Frick’s bedroom, where he passed away on December 2, 1919, surrounded by the warmth of the walnut paneling and possibly gazing at George Romney’s Lady Hamilton as “Nature.” Overlooking Central Park, pots of porcelain black poppies celebrate Frick’s gift of his collection to the public while also striking a melancholy note. Also on this level, porcelain tulips are presented in a tulip-inspired vase that was made in Vienna’s Du Paquier Manufactory around 1725.
Kanevsky’s installation—which is accompanied by an illustrated publication—is the latest in a series of interventions in the Frick’s galleries by living artists. Past presentations of this kind include Porcelain, No Simple Matter: Arlene Shechet and the Arnhold Collection (2016–17); Elective Affinities: Edmund de Waal at The Frick Collection (2019); Living Histories: Queer Views and Old Masters (2021–22, Frick Madison); Olafur Eliasson and Claude Monet (2022–23, Frick Madison); and Nicolas Party and Rosalba Carriera (2023–24, Frick Madison).
PUBLIC PROGRAMMING
The installation is complemented by a number of engaging public programs. On Monday, May 19, at 6:00 p.m., Kanevsky will discuss his work and the Frick display alongside Salomon during the inaugural artist conversation in the museum’s new Stephen A. Schwarzman Auditorium. Porcelain Garden will also be spotlighted during brief talks by Frick educators on select Friday evenings, when the museum remains open until 9:00 p.m. Additionally, it will serve as a source of inspiration for participants in the popular Sketch Nights event series. For more information, please visit frick.org/programs.
ABOUT VLADIMIR KANEVSKY
Born in 1951 in Kharkiv, Ukraine (then part of the Soviet Union), Vladimir Kanevsky studied architecture in Russia and afterward became a figurative sculptor. Both architecture and sculpture are fundamental to his approach in creating his porcelain plants and flowers, with sculptural qualities going hand in hand with each piece’s architectural conception, envisioned as a structure that inhabits space.
After emigrating to the United States, where he has been based for thirty-five years, Kanevsky began to create his flowers. By no means simple representations of natural flowers—though he does aim for accurate depiction—the creations are artistic interpretations in the same manner of a still life by Jan van Huysum or a vase of porcelain flowers made at the Vincennes Manufactory. Over the years, Kanevsky has engaged with the long tradition of European porcelain production, including a series of pieces created and exhibited at the Meissen Manufactory in 2012 and 2017.
In 2017, Kanevsky also exhibited his work at Saint Petersburg’s Winter Palace, once the residence of Russia’s czars and now part of the State Hermitage Museum. In 2021, Kanevsky showed more flowers created for the Hillwood Estate, Museum & Gardens in Washington, D.C.
INSTALLATION SUPPORT
This installation is made possible through the generous support of Mr. and Mrs. Charles M. Royce, Ellen A. Michelson, Douglas Dockery Thomas, and Patricia Dugan Perlmuth in memory of Bill Perlmuth.
Image: Vladimir Kanevsky (b. 1951, Ukraine), Cascading Roses, 2024–25, installed in the Fragonard Room of The Frick Collection, New York, parian body, copper and terracotta; work courtesy of the artist, photo: Joseph Coscia Jr.