Dane Lovett: Flowers

Dane Lovett’s flower paintings both embrace and eschew their historical, thematic and allegorical roots. Dark, often monochromatic and subtly tonal in their palette, the scores of works that populate the Melbourne-based artist’s debut book Flowers gesture towards the syntaxes of minimalism and seriality as resolutely as they do the still life. It’s an intriguing dynamic, which expands and further articulates Lovett’s culturally savvy, reference-rich painting practice.Where earlier works saw the artist construct still life arrangements from indoor plants and pop-cultural ephemera – VHS cassettes, vinyl records, CDs, ageing tech and the like – Lovett’s recent practice has seen him embrace repetition and delicate variation, with an unmistakably reductionist and art historical bent. Here, he recasts French artist Henri Fantin-Latour’s 1864 still life Flowers: Tulips, Camellias, Hyacinths in countless murky, monochromatic iterations – a single vase of flowers becoming a site for sustained p