Strauss & co - 7 March 2011, Cape Town

188 Of this body of work entitled Flora Capensis Andrew Putter states: Flora Capensis explores the historical possibility of a novel, hybrid culture that might have emerged from a different kind of relationship between the Khoekhoe and the Dutch. Inspired by the place- name ‘Hottentots Holland’, the series begins with a question: what if the ‘Hottentots’and the Hollanders had liked each other? ... The Flora Capensis series invokes the 17th-century Dutch through their exquisite flower paintings. ... the Khoekhoe ... are invoked obliquely, through the materials from which the still lifes are composed. The flowers, rocks, insects and vessels in these images are all indigenous to the pre-Dutch Cape, the ancestral world of the Khoekhoe. The status of indigenous Cape flowers today is in some ways emblematic of the history of the Khoekhoe. Although there are more kinds of plants in the Cape Floristic Kingdom than there are in the whole of the northern hemisphere, many of these plants are now extinct, endangered or rarely seen. Centuries of European-dominated taste for exotic plants have led to a radical reduction in the extraordinarily diverse veld that once 325 Andrew Putter SOUTH AFRICAN 1965- Hottentots Holland: Flora Capensis 6, 2008 archival pigment print on cotton rag paper 78 by 64,5cm R25 000–35 000