Forest invites us to get back to nature and experience all that is wondrous and magical about the wooded landscape. Featuring some of the most influential contemporary artists working today such as Mariele Neudecker, Dalziel + Scullion and Turner Prize-nominated artist Anya Gallaccio, Forest brings together a diverse and exciting selection of works which explore the mysteries of the woodland environment. Showing works by 13 artists, this exhibition addresses not only the striking landscape of the natural world but also the cultural context of the forest in our increasingly urban environment, bringing together a body of work which stimulates both the eyes and the mind. As the artist Roger Kelly observes in the catalogue, this exhibition “re-emphasises that the landscape will always be that ‘other’ place, greater, stronger, darker, deeper, and somehow always unfamiliar.” Combining photography, painting, video and an extraordinary waxwork installation by Ken Parsons, Forest explores both the literal and metaphorical visions of the woodlands, and the mythical enchantment of the ‘other’ world contained within its foliage. Forest is a Wolverhampton Art Gallery touring exhibition

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.

  • Installation

    An artwork comprised of many and various elements of miscellaneous materials (see mixed media), light and sound, which is conceived for and occupies an entire space, gallery or site. The viewer can often enter or walk around the installation. Installations may only exist as long as they are installed, but can be re-created in different sites. Installation art emerged in the 1960s out of Environmental Art (works of art which are three-dimensional environments), but it was not until the 1970s that the term came into common use and not until the late 1980s that artists started to specialise in this kind of work, creating a genre of ‘Installation Art’. The term can also be applied to the arrangement of selected art works in an exhibition.

  • 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.

  • Video

    Images recorded on videotape or on optical disc to be viewed on television screens, or projected onto screens. The medium through which these images are recorded and displayed.