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FEUTCHE BLATTER/MOIST LEAVES, MOIST SHEETS

© Rut Blees Luxemburg. All Rights Reserved, DACS 2023.

FEUTCHE BLATTER/MOIST LEAVES, MOIST SHEETS 1998

Rut Blees Luxemburg (1967 – )

Details

Dimension
150 X 180 CM
Media
C-TYPE PHOTOGRAPHIC PRINT ON ALUMINIUM
Accession number
P7198

Summary

Rut Blees Luxemburg uses a particularly long exposure time in the shooting of her night time London cityscapes, which has the effect of removing any human evidence or activity from the frame. Emptied streets, gloomy tower blocks and deserted car parks take on a dramatic glamour and even the grittiest scene, such as the foliage reflected in the dirty puddle in this work, becomes a thing of beauty. As nature is increasingly seen as endangered and in need of protection from civilisation, it is confined within designated gardens and wilderness areas – the urban equivalent being the glass atria of city offices, bursting with perfect tree specimens. The vestiges of nature which have survived in haphazard urban locations, doubtless the cultivating efforts of a previous century, awaken in us a romantic image of the ‘real’ urban landscape. In this photograph the citizens of London have apparently vanished, but they have left their traces in the landscape.

Landscape, The British Council 2000

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.

  • Photograph

    A permanent image taken by means of the chemical action of light on light-sensitive surfaces.