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What does a gallery facade look like when it's been given over entirely to spring? At Maddox Gallery on Maddox Street, the answer is moss curtains, sculpted hedging and a wash of pink petunias - a floral welcome built to match the world inside.
Wildabout has returned to Maddox Gallery with a new installation, created to celebrate the opening of South Korean artist Mulgil Kim's first London exhibition, "Green Melody, Blue Poem." It's a collaboration we've returned to more than once, and this latest piece continues that relationship with a design that feels playful, textural and completely in tune with the work on show.
The brief was to create something that felt like an extension of the gallery's doorway rather than a decoration bolted onto it. Two sweeping moss curtains, scattered with delicate pink spray roses, frame the entrance like drawn-back drapes - heavy with texture, but light in feel. Sculpted box hedging runs along the top of the shopfront, while a deep border of pink petunias spills along the base, softening the line between street and gallery.
The effect is immersive rather than ornamental. Passers-by on Maddox Street don't just see flowers outside a gallery - they walk through a threshold that's been entirely reimagined, with the painted world inside spilling out onto the pavement.
Every choice in this installation took its cue from Kim's paintings. "Green Melody, Blue Poem" is full of soft, dreamlike landscapes - rolling green hills, moonlit trees, blossom rendered as cloud and wave - and the floral design echoes that same gentle, layered quality.
The deep greens of the moss curtains nod directly to the saturated greens running through Kim's work, while the pink petunias and spray roses pick up the cherry blossom motifs that drift across several of the paintings, including the centrepiece visible through the gallery window: a green wave cresting with pink blossom, carrying a small surfer and his dog.
It's a quiet kind of storytelling. The florals aren't trying to compete with the art - they're translating its mood into something three-dimensional, textural and alive on the street outside.
This is far from the first time Wildabout has worked with Maddox Gallery, and that familiarity shows. Knowing the space - its proportions, its light, the way the bowed shopfront window frames whatever sits behind the glass - allows for a design that feels considered rather than generic, built specifically for this building and this exhibition rather than transplanted from elsewhere.
"Green Melody, Blue Poem" marks Mulgil Kim's first solo exhibition in London, running at Maddox Gallery from 22 May to 19 June. The show brings together a serene new body of work in which moonlit skies, quiet trees and dreamlike natural worlds create poetic spaces for connection, memory and emotion to gently overlap.
Kim has described the paintings as wanting to feel like "a score without notes, a poem without words" - soft, contemplative and quietly atmospheric, inviting viewers to simply pause.
Standing outside, surrounded by moss and blossom, that feeling starts before you've even stepped through the door.
Credits Venue: Maddox Gallery Artist: Mulgil Kim, @sooroway Florals: Wildabout Flowers Exhibition: "Green Melody, Blue Poem," 22 May - 19 June, Maddox Gallery, 9 Maddox Street