Mapping Landscapes

Investigating the relationship of artists with the 'outside world', this exhibition brings together works ranging from the 19th to the 21st centuries, exploring affinities and connections across generations and eras. The show highlights the vitality and diversity of artists' ideas of 'landscape' and definitions of 'nature'. The paintings and drawings on view reflect a varied and evolving understanding of the world around us, suggesting political, social and psychological dimensions to human ecological consciousness.

 

The early industrial revolution and the development of photography in the 1850s radically changed artists' emotive conceptions of landscape, as conveyed through the realism of Courbet and the plein-air practice of painters such as Corot and Daubigny. The artistic concept of Nature evolved with further social and economic transformations associated with two world wars, growing global awareness through mass media, the 'Space Age', urbanism and the advance of high-tech and 'post-industrial' epochs. All these, and their accompanying developments in human philosophy, have again been reflected in the ways artists understand reality in the late Twentieth and early Twenty-First Centuries.

 

The first of a series of focus shows looking at modern and contemporary art, this exhibition sets early and late modernist art in dialogue with the contemporary, to reveal both the commonalities and contrasts between them.

 

The exhibition will include: Gustave Courbet, Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot, Charles-François Daubigny, André Derain, Adrian Morris, Prunella Clough, Carol Rhodes, Genevieve Asse and Miriam Cahn.