PENINSULA

© Courtesy the artist and Pippy Houldsworth Gallery, London

PENINSULA 1998

Tania Kovats (1966 – )

Details

Dimension
68.5 X 176 X 59
Media
ACRYLIC COMPOSITE AND MDF
Accession number
P7173

Summary

Kovats’ work incorporates the intricate representation of landscape features, using the rhetoric of scientific illustration and suggesting a depiction of ‘true’ nature. This intention is belied by the miniature scale and the truncating of the landscape into a section, framed by the gallery wall or apparently cropped into a geometric form. Peninsulais a strange, hybrid form – part white minimalist sculpture, part geological model of a peninsula and rock formation. Derived from landscape motifs in religious painting and the kitsch replicas of grottos and caves, sites of miracles and apparitions, these landscape forms are meticulous renditions of natural architectural features, deliberately constructed and displayed to make evident the artifice.

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.

  • 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.

  • Sculpture

    A three-dimensional work of art. Such works may be carved, modelled, constructed, or cast. Sculptures can also be described as assemblage, in the round, relief, and made in a huge variety of media. Contemporary practice also includes live elements, as in Gilbert & George 'Living Sculpture' as well as broadcast work, radio or sound sculpture.