Polixeni Papapetrou – Country Style 2025

We are honoured to have the late, great artist Polixeni Papapetrou represented in our 2025 Country Style show with a selection of ebullient, optically charged, hyper-floral photographs from her award-winning 2016 series Eden, described by the artist at the time of her works’ original debut as a controlled study of floral abundance. The sitter in several photographs from Papapetrou’s Eden series is her daughter, Olympia, who appears enmeshed within a pictorially dense and dazzling profusion of cascading blooms.

Beautifully entwining the symbolism of flowers and their suggestions of nature’s cycles of life and death with the early flushes of adolescence and the shift from childhood to maturity, works from Eden count among Papapetrou’s most indelible images, with one memorably gracing the cover of the monograph that accompanied her career retrospective at the National Gallery of Victoria.

Works chosen to feature in Heirloom include one of the final remaining editions of Delphi, for which Papapetrou was named the 2017 recipient of Australia’s most prestigious award for photo-based media, the William and Winifred Bowness Photography Prize.

Heirloom celebrates Papapetrou’s important creative legacy and the enduring resonance of her artfully constructed, otherworldly portraits, delighting in her medium’s potential for fabulation, self-creation and the blurring of reality and fantasy.

To preview and acquire works by Polixeni Papapetrou from Heirloom ahead of the exhibition’s opening at Michael Reid Murrurundi, please email colinesoria@michaelreid.com.au