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This edition was made to coincide with the group exhibition 'Flowers - Flora in Contemporary Art & Culture', where you can see The Sunny Side of the Moon (In the Night Garden) on display until 5th May 2025 at Saatchi Gallery, London.

About the work:

The Sunny Side of the Moon (In the Night Garden)
Oil on canvas
278.5 x 417.0 cm

When Quinn studied art history in the 1980s, he became enamoured with Dutch flower painting of the 16th and 17th centuries. These painters were obliged to wait for each flower to come into season before painting it into their compositions, culminating in images of ideal but impossible bouquets. 

Walking through New Covent Garden Flower Market in 2005, Quinn observed these different species, imagining the cargo ships, the planes, the laboratories, the vast map of modern commerce – that had produced such an aberration of nature’s seasonal and geographic patterns. 


The Sunny Side of the Moon (In the Night Garden) belongs to Quinn’s series of flower paintings that subvert one of the oldest forms of picture making: the still-life. To create these hyper-realist oil paintings, Quinn creates a still-life arrangement in his studio using flowers and fruit bought in London on a particular day, underscoring the immense changes in society and production since his earlier influences were painting their bouquets. Quinn photographs the arrangements and then makes oil paintings based on the photographs. The paintings depict a frozen moment of ‘unnatural’ time. In The Sunny Side of the Moon (In the Night Garden) is part of a series of paintings in which Quinn reversed the colours of the original photograph before painting it. More surreal and dreamlike, often large in scale and dramatically coloured, these works are connected to the unconscious—their beauty belies a sinister subtext: the relentless human desire to control nature.