Nicholas Zirk
Floriography

From July 10 to August 30, 2025

Galerie Nicolas Robert, Montréal, is pleased to present Floriography, an exhibition of new paintings by Nicholas Zirk.

“A rose is a rose is a rose” - Gertrude Stein

Floriography—from flos (flower) and graphein (to write)—is the practice of communicating through flowers, a practice which has existed continuously for centuries. The idea that certain flowers carry specific symbolic meanings is deeply embedded in many cultures. As children, we learn that roses symbolize love, poppies suggest remembrance, and white carnations are for funerals. In Victorian England, floriography evolved into an elaborate and complex system of clandestine communication between young lovers. Due to the era's repressive social mores, discussing intimacy openly was taboo. In response, young lovers devised a coded language of floral symbolism, sending each other bouquets as love letters, allowing the flowers to say what they could not. These bouquets—known as tussie-mussies—used both specific flowers and numbers of stems to connote precise meanings.

Nicholas Zirk’s still life painting practice explores meaning-making and our perceptions of reality through the codified genre of the vanitas. Traditional vanitas paintings used symbolic objects to tell moral tales about the transience of life and the folly of material pursuits. These symbols function in a one-to-one way, where an object relates directly to a specific story, which is read by the viewer. Zirk, on the other hand, takes a postmodern approach: his object-symbols reference symbolism itself, suggesting a multiplicity of interpretations which challenge our inherent modes of meaning-making. His recent floral still lifes extend this meta-symbolism to flowers and gardens, using ornamentation, repetition, and composition to examine how we construct meaning in our everyday experience.

Further emphasizing this point, Zirk’s recent works include hidden impasto symbols and constellations that only reveal themselves when viewed from certain perspectives. These symbols—free-floating signifiers drawn from contemporary pop culture—remind us of the inherent slipperiness of meaning in our present moment. The constellations evoke patterns of thought, synaptically linking seemingly unrelated elements across the picture plane, while visually echoing the floral motifs on the surface.

In Floriography, Zirk’s floral paintings invert a modernist adage, engaging with the over-saturation of meaning characteristic of our internet-addled era. Zirk contends: a rose is not a rose is not a rose—a rose is everything. 

Nicholas Zirk, born and raised in Vancouver, currently lives and works in Montreal. Zirk is currently completing his MFA at Concordia University, having earned his BFA from OCAD University in Toronto. He has exhibited in solo and group exhibitions in Toronto, Montreal, and Vancouver, as well as internationally in New York City and Los Angeles. Periodically, Zirk also organizes exhibitions of other artists' works, having curated shows in Vancouver and Toronto.