"The most beautiful flowers grow in the foulest soil"
- a folk proverb of uncertain origin that haunted Baudelaire, and one that finds a new kind of echo in King's Invented Botanicals.
This aphorism perfectly captures the essence of Les Fleurs du Mal, Charles Baudelaire's foundational 1857 poetry collection, in which the flower acts as a powerful metaphor for art and beauty. Baudelaire subverted the traditional Romantic view of nature, arguing that poetry can extract aesthetic and emotional sublimity from the darkest, most corrupt facets of modern life.
King's intention with his latest series was to set himself a creative challenge: to produce a body of paintings that reimagines traditional floral art through a semi-abstract lens. The work exists in a deliberate tension between the familiar and the invented — between the recognisable language of botanical painting and something altogether more personal and experimental.
Some pieces in the series, such as the lilies, remain relatively faithful to their natural counterparts. The forms are carefully observed, the proportions considered, and there is an honest attempt to honour the elegance of the flower as it exists in nature. Yet even here, abstraction begins to emerge in the handling of colour, the simplification of line, and the interpretation of light rather than its mere documentation.
For the majority of the works, however, he allowed imagination to take the lead. The resulting forms are flower-like in character; they carry suggestions of petals, bloom, and organic growth, yet they belong to no species found in the natural world. They are invented botanicals: plausible in feeling, impossible in fact.
What excites King most is where this exploration might lead next. He hopes to push further into this invented world by reintroducing the structural and contextual elements of traditional floral painting — vases, stems, leaves, and the interplay of light across a tabletop — while populating these settings with increasingly abstract and unpredictable forms. The supporting elements would remain grounded and recognisable, lending the compositions a sense of familiarity and stillness, while the blooms themselves become progressively more liberated from botanical reality.
In this way, the props become a kind of anchor — a visual contract with the viewer — while the flowers become the space in which imagination and abstraction are given free rein.
Visit Warren King at Artists at Home
19 - 21 June 2026
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Sunday 11am-6pm
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Brought up in Belfast during the Troubles, King moved to England as a teenager, where he studied Graphic Design at Medway College of Art in Kent. He is a London-based painter, primarily working in acrylic.
In December 2026, King will be taking part in a group exhibition at Ryan Graff Contemporary Gallery in San Francisco. In October 2025 he exhibited with the Firepit Gallery at the Affordable Art Fair in Battersea, and in 2024 and 2025 he was shortlisted for the New Emergence Art Prize and was selected by Artit as one of their landscape artists of the year. His work has also been recently purchased by globally acclaimed portrait painter Christian Hook.
In 2023 and 2024, King took part in group exhibitions at Barnes Easter Art Fair and Art Firepit, a collective showcasing work in the Design District of Greenwich Peninsula.
Interviewed by Made in Bed, the in-house magazine of Sotheby's, his work appeared in their review of 2022. King's work was also published in the 2022 hardback edition of Contemporary Art Collectors, which features the world's top 100 emerging artists. He had a solo exhibition at Pringle of Scotland in Mayfair, and his solo exhibition Martyrs was on display at the Lauderdale Gallery in Maida Vale until 11 August that year. Warren also took part in a group exhibition at Artemesia Gallery in Denver, Colorado, which ran until early 2022.
In July 2021 he was one of the winners of the Turner Open Call, run by Turner Contemporary in Margate, Kent, and in 2018 and 2020 he was shortlisted for the Emerge and New Emergence art prizes.
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Courtesy and ©Warren King and Renée Pfister Art & Gallery Consultancy 2026.