Hothouse: The Flower in Contemporary Art

About the exhibition
Taking a subject matter with a rich symbolic history, Hothouse presented a contemporary take on the flower in art across installation, painting, photography and sculpture by twenty Australian artists. While the botanical theme may be a perennially popular one and is thus well-suited to a touring exhibition, Hothouse, according to the critic Juliette Peers, also showed the way in which ‘serious intellectual and philosophical questions are played out through the surface disguise of the apparently everyday flower’.

Initially presented across MUMA and the State Library of Victoria’s Keith Murdoch Gallery, the exhibition spoke not only to tropes of art history, such as the still life genre, but also to contemporary environmental and postcolonial concerns. In the catalogue essay, Zara Stanhope wrote about the botanical collecting and illustration that accompanied colonial settlement in Australia, describing the country as ‘literally and metaphorically speaking, a hothouse of botanical curiosities [that] propagates impassioned responses to the wonder and significance of its native and introduced flora.’

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^{Image: Lauren Berkowitz, Colour field 2002, salt and weeds, 2.5 x 600 x 600 cm (dimensions variable). Courtesy of the artist and Sherman Galleries, Sydney}