Robert Mapplethorpe in CODED BLOOMS
7 March—24 May 2026
Group exhibition at the Museum of Australian Photography, Victoria, Australia
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.
In Brassington’s images, the bloom hovers within a charged psychological space; Barton amplifies it into symbols of desire, transformation and the feminine psyche. Preval lingers on the flower’s vulnerability after its peak, while Yan traces intimacy through shadow and silhouette. Together, these artists confirm that flowers have never been innocent.