Lot: 849

Florian Graf (1980 Basel - lives and works ibid)
Skulptur 'Flow Ever Yours', 2025

Steel, painted pink. H. 105 x 52 x 84 cm. Signed on the underside: Florian Graf and dated: 2025 (black marker). One-of-a-kind.

Provenance: Acquired in 2025 at the Basel Social Club, Basel, directly from the artist; in a private collection ever since.

With 'Flow Ever Yours', Florian Graf transforms a familiar everyday object into a poetic reflection on cycles, care, and movement. The starting point is the watering can—a tool for gardening that symbolizes the fundamental interplay between humans and nature. Water is distributed, plants are nourished; at the same time, plants produce the oxygen that humans need to live. This simple process encapsulates a principle of giving and receiving, of flowing and returning. Graf liberates the watering can from its functional logic and transforms it into a cycle of loops, twists, and detours. The viewer’s gaze follows these movements, loses track of a clear beginning and end, and is repeatedly led back to its starting point. Thus, the sculpture appears as a kind of visual perpetual motion machine—a system that seemingly sustains itself. The title 'Flow Ever Yours' refers not only to the flow of water but also to a continuous exchange. The sculpture can be interpreted as an image of a 'self-fulfilling prophecy': What we put out into the world returns to us—perhaps via detours and in altered form. This concept of a cycle also finds its counterpart in the human body. Blood circulates, breath moves between the inside and the outside, and thoughts and feelings are constantly in motion. The watering can thus transforms from a tool into a symbol of a broader system in which nature, the body, and consciousness are interconnected. Characteristic of Graf’s work is the shift from the ordinary to the extraordinary. The gardener’s familiar tool becomes the protagonist and loses its unambiguous function in favor of an open, almost organically growing form. At the same time, the connection between the garden, care, and the cycle evokes a thought that Voltaire expressed in his famous phrase 'Il faut cultiver notre jardin': We must cultivate our garden—and with it, the cycle in which we ourselves are embedded. Flow Ever Yours is thus at once an object, a movement, and a conceptual framework: a sculpture about flow, return, and the indissoluble connection between giving and receiving.

Estimate: 12,000 € - 15,000 €