Step into Brookfield Place this season and you’ll feel it immediately: something has shifted. Light doesn’t just pass through the glass, it blooms. Color doesn’t sit still, it breathes. With Fleeting Opulence, British art collective Graphic Rewilding has turned one of Lower Manhattan’s most polished architectural spaces into something unexpectedly alive.
Their towering, large-scale installations stretch across glass facades and flood the Winter Garden atrium with luminous color, cherry blossoms suspended mid-bloom, honeybees hovering in motion, leaves refracting sunlight like stained glass. It’s immersive, but more importantly, it’s emotional.
The artists, Catherine Borowski and Lee Baker, didn’t just design for the space, they listened to it.
“We are tremendously inspired by the power of stained glass, often found in vast sacred spaces,” they explain. “The stunning design of Brookfield Place is a veritable cathedral to natural light, and affords us the chance to express our maximalist imagery in a perfect light-filled environment.”
That idea, turning a commercial, glass-and-steel environment into something almost sacred is at the core of their work. Graphic Rewilding doesn’t aim to replicate nature. It aims to remind you that you’ve forgotten it.
“Our everyday urban lives are often devoid of significant encounters with nature,” they say, “often leading to what has been termed the ‘extinction of experience’, where people begin to forget that nature exists. And while we would never say we are trying to replace real nature, we want to tap into that aspect of our consciousness to uplift people with vast biophilic shapes and colors.”
And that’s where Fleeting Opulence hits differently. It doesn’t whisper. It insists.
Using what they call “Microscopic Maximalism,” the artists take the smallest, most overlooked details like petals, pollen, insects, and expand them to architectural scale. “We take flowers or details that might often be overlooked, and blow them up so huge that they cannot be avoided,” they explain, “hopefully prompting a reexamination of the subject matter. We are both huge fans of artists such as Jeanne Claude & Christo, who use scale to readdress perception.”
You don’t just see the work, you are confronted by it. And in that confrontation, something softens.
There’s a playful, almost cartoon-like quality to the oversized flowers, but look closer and the depth reveals itself. The bold outlines echo Japanese Ukiyo-e prints and Sumi-e ink painting, while the compositions are meticulously balanced. “Japanese art is incredibly concerned with the power of composition to create balance,” they note. “We work very hard to compose our work in a similar way, whether the artwork is a 2D picture, a 3D immersive space, or a projected animation.”
That balance between whimsy and precision is what makes the work accessible across audiences. Kids are drawn to the color and scale. Adults linger for the meaning. And the meaning evolves throughout the day.
“Yes indeed,” they say of the shifting light. “We build the architectural environments in 3D, in order to not only understand the landscape, but also to model the position and motion of the sun. We also create animations and place our viewpoints in numerous places around the 3D space in order to understand how the light cast color will transmit.” This isn’t static art, it’s a living system. Morning light casts a gentle glow. By afternoon, the space is saturated in color. By evening, it softens again. Each moment is different. Each visit is new.
Behind that seamless experience is an intensely detailed process.
“We visited the space and took loads of video footage, as well as Lidar scans using an app called Scaniverse. From this, we built a 3D model of the Winter Garden,” they explain. “From our flower research, we then began sketching the flowers, which were then redrawn individually in vector software. This is a very painstaking process and can take weeks and weeks, but it means that we then have all the separate flowers and insects ready to ‘digitally flower arrange’. We are then flitting back and forth between vector designs and the 3D renders of the space until we are happy with how things look. Often we are working from accurate models from the get-go, so when it comes to working with the printers, or fabricators, it makes life a lot easier.”
Weeks turn into months. Digital becomes physical. And even then, nothing is left to chance. “Because this artwork ended up being on glass, there was lots of testing of the various glass vinyl prints to see how intense to make the colors and how much light to let through for optimum effect. As you can see, there is a lot that can go wrong along the way, but we have been doing this for many years and so we know many of the pitfalls. That said, we are still caught out occasionally!”
What you see is effortless. What it took is anything but. The partnership behind Graphic Rewilding is just as intentional. Born from a chance meeting on a flight to New York, Borowski and Baker have spent over a decade refining how they work together.
“Catherine’s superpower is making things happen, even on a vast scale. She knows how to work with numerous teams and has a gift for making people feel at ease while still getting the job done. Lee designs the artworks, enjoys learning new ways of doing things and loves nothing more than being given a creative challenge. This blend seems to work very well, but is always evolving.”
That evolution shows. Their influences range from Dutch still-life to Christo and Jeanne-Claude, from Yayoi Kusama’s repetition to the discipline of Japanese ink work. “Japanese Ink Painting shows itself in the line work of the drawings, Dutch Still life in the sheer variety of flora and fauna, Christo and Jeanne Claude in the scale, and Yayoi Kusama in the repetition across huge spaces.”
It’s a layered visual language, but one that never feels inaccessible. Because at its core, this work is about a pause.
“Exactly, it’s an opportunity for a cognitive pause,” they say. “I’m reading a fantastic book at the moment called ‘Slow Looking: the art of nature’ by Olivia Meehan. In it, she describes how learning to take a moment to reflect can help mitigate our ever ‘on-demand’ existence. It also inspires enquiry, curiosity and empathy - things that live beyond the strictures of algorithms and pre-emptive text.”
And maybe that’s the real value here, not just aesthetic, but emotional. In a city that rarely slows down, Fleeting Opulence creates a reason to look up. To stop. To notice. To feel. That’s also why their work resonates so widely.
“We know that our work does seem to have a positive effect on a wide demographic of people,” they reflect, recalling a past installation that remained untouched for years in a struggling neighborhood. “Several years ago, we did a Graphic rewilding takeover of a street in a place in the UK, called Crawley. It was a pretty rundown area that was very affected by COVID. That artwork was only supposed to stay up for 3 months but they kept it for 3 years and it did not have one piece of vandalism on it. That felt like a real success.”
It’s rare for public art to feel both monumental and intimate. To be bold enough to command attention, yet gentle enough to hold it. Graphic Rewilding has found that balance, and Fleeting Opulence may be their most compelling expression yet.
Because once you experience it, you start to understand something deeper: this isn’t just decoration. It’s a shift in perception.
And that’s exactly why their work is worth visiting. It brings something most spaces are missing—wonder, reflection, and a reconnection to the natural world, translated through scale, color, and light. It’s art that doesn’t just sit on a wall. It transforms the environment and the person inside it.
Or, as they’ve shown us, sometimes all it takes is a flower, made impossibly large, to remind you how small moments can feel again.
