Flowers have long stood in for what could not be spoken aloud: sex, death, longing, defiance. Soft in appearance yet potent in meaning, they are among art history’s great deceivers. Across centuries and cultures, the bloom has functioned as a visual code, a form artists have returned to, reclaimed and rewritten to speak about desire, power and taboo.
CODED BLOOMS begins with the American photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, whose flower photographs form the exhibition’s conceptual anchor. Drawn from the collection of the National Gallery of Australia, these works establish a charged framework for a contemporary rereading of the floral. In Mapplethorpe’s hands, the bloom becomes sculptural, erotic and exacting, stripped of sentiment and sharpened into form.
From this point, four artists push the floral beyond polite still life traditions into unruly and intimate terrain. Pat Brassington, Del Kathryn Barton, Jake Preval and Meng-Yu Yan each approach the flower as a site of psychological tension, bodily presence and relational meaning. Here, petals, shadows and surfaces operate as signals, carrying what is hidden, forbidden or quietly radical.
FREE entry
until 24 May 2026
Museum of Australian Photography (MAPh)
860 Ferntree Gully Rd Wheelers Hill VIC
0385440500
maph.org.au
@maph_photography
Image:
Del Kathryn BARTON
u r my flower 2025–26
two-screen film installation
dimensions variable
multichannel audio
duration 30 minutes
courtesy of the artist and Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery (Sydney)
For more information click here
