Curated by artist Daniel Sturgis in collaboration with Grizedale Arts, ‘Against Landscape’ uses the artworks to consider how the ideas, genius or place of landscape painting have been manifested, but not overtly displayed, in a variety of practices. As such the exhibition will therefore not include any “straight- forward” landscape paintings, but will rather present a diverse collection of contemporary and historic works that revolve around the idea(s) of “landscape representation” in “painting”.

The exhibition takes its initial inspiration from the English Lake District, the history of the Coniston Institute and some of the contested traditions which are at its heart, such as the opposing but connected positions of Wordsworth and Ruskin (and the romantic against the useful). The exhibition also highlights the way much modernist painting, while trying to escape the influence of landscape painting, had a heightened awareness of the rural embedded within it.

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Collection Artist(s)

Glossary

  • Contemporary

    Existing or coming into being at the same period; of today or of the present. The term that designates art being made today.

  • 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.

  • Painting

    Work of art made with paint on a surface. Often the surface, also called a support, is a tightly stretched piece of canvas, paper or a wooden panel. Painting involves a wide range of techniques and materials, along with the artist's intellectual concerns effecting the content of a work.