MONUMENT

© The Artist

MONUMENT 1998

Michael Raedecker (1963 – )

Details

Dimension
142.5 X 183.5 CM
Media
ACRYLIC AND THREAD ON CANVAS
Accession number
P7096

Summary

Michael Raedecker combines the traditions of Dutch landscape painting and abstract picture making, the imagery of Modernist architecture and the materials of fashion and furnishings in his spare evocations of uninhabited landscapes. This essentially empty canvas contains areas of detail suggesting indistinct landscape features or architectural elements, registered in painting and a combination of threads or yarns, applied in linear gestures, closely embroidered or hanging in loose strands. The inclusion of structures such as the low bungalow in this painting introduces a classic modern aesthetic. The browns, creams, bleached greens and greys of the thread and canvas compound the modernist feel but this palette also conveys a sombre tone. A haunting, uneasy atmosphere pervades.

Landscape, The British Council 2000

 

Glossary

  • Canvas

    A piece of cloth woven from flax, hemp or cotton fibres. The word has generally come to refer to any piece of firm, loosely woven fabric used to paint on. Its surface is typically prepared for painting by priming with a ground.

  • Hanging

    A woven, embroidered or otherwise decorated length of cloth displayed on a wall.

  • 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.