Born in 1966, Tania Kovats is an artist concerned with the experience and understanding of landscape. After completing an MA at the Royal College of Art in 1990, she has exhibited her work internationally and in the UK. Her work is present in many major collections as well existing as significant permanent public commissions. Primarily a sculptor, in recent years Kovats’ work has responded to what she describes as ‘geologically explicit landscapes’ where the process of gradual transformations like erosion, compression and subsistence are evident. Travel is often central to her work, from Meadow (2007) - the transportation of a complete wildflower meadow by canal boat from Bath to London - to her 2008 journey around South America, exploring the landscape where Darwin first began to develop his evolutionary ideas. She lives and works in London.

Glossary

  • Landscape

    Landscape is one of the principle genres of Western art. In early paintings the landscape was a backdrop for the composition, but in the late 17th Century the appreciation of nature for its own sake began with the French and Dutch painters (from whom the term derived). Their treatment of the landscape differed: the French tried to evoke the classical landscape of ancient Greece and Rome in a highly stylised and artificial manner; the Dutch tried to paint the surrounding fields, woods and plains in a more realistic way. As a genre, landscape grew increasing popular, and by the 19th Century had moved away from a classical rendition to a more realistic view of the natural world. Two of the greatest British landscape artists of that time were John Constable and JMW Turner, whose works can be seen in the Tate collection (www.tate.org.uk). There can be no doubt that the evolution of landscape painting played a decisive role in the development of Modernism, culminating in the work of the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists . Since then its demise has often been predicted and with the rise of abstraction, landscape painting was thought to have degenerated into an amateur pursuit. However, landscape persisted in some form into high abstraction, and has been a recurrent a theme in most of the significant tendencies of the 20th Century. Now manifest in many media, landscape no longer addresses solely the depiction of topography, but encompasses issues of social, environmental and political concern.