LONDON.- In the canon of Western art, the landscape is among the most traditional of subjects. This exhibition brings together work embracing the traditions of landscape painting, using the natural world to construct images that are both real and reimagined within the artists’ unique visual languages.
Tai Shan Schierenberg, William Crozier and Lucy Jones explore the boundaries of colour to enrich their paintings with unexpected bursts and flashes of paint, the vivid hues seemingly conveying an emotive response rather than a true rendition of the subject. In Tom Phillips’s Road to Alice Springs, 2012, his jewel-like collage is evocative of the area’s climate, appearing as if the heat is shimmering back at the viewer, the fragmented shards of colour configured to create an abstracted mirage.
In Still Night, 2022, Ken Currie’s foreboding dark becalmed sea is seen as if filtered through the blue light of dusk or dawn. In contrast, an angry red light is shown shining in the distance, its purpose is intentionally unexplained. In seafaring communities, light has been used as a means of communication in remote parts of the world; here, the reason is left unknown: a warning flare, or a threat.
There is a dream-like sense to many of the works, with artists like Gill Rocca and Friedemann Hahn composing environments which are familiar to our visual archives yet wholly created by the artist. Rocca’s exquisitely rendered Arcadia-esque woodlands in the Figment paintings are luminous with a still, otherworldly quality. In Kopf mit Blumen, 1992, Hahn imagines an abstracted field of iris flowers, merging his own practice with that of the impressionist painter Van Gogh as he camouflages a suggested portrait of the late artist amongst the flowers’ blooms.
Anna Maria Schönrock explores the impact of touch within her practice, focusing on the fusing of touch with memory of a place; in Landscape, 2014, her dashes of paint stark against a pale, bleached background are reminiscent of the sense of tufts of grass brushing past you. As a partially sighted artist, Raffaella’s ephemeral paintings draw viewers into her world by capturing fleeting moments suspended in “persistent vision,” where her sight is in constant motion, and images appear only briefly as faint shadows or flickers of light. Embodying the emotional weight of navigating the world through touch and sound, as seen in her work Fleeting Visions in a Downpour, 2025, Bianca Raffaella’s paintings capture a profound sense of vulnerable solitude that can arise from this perspective alongside temporal, joyous and playful moments of celebration and solace.
In contrast, other artists have focused on the impact of specific locations. Hepher’s Fusina’s Field IV, 1998, inspired by his time spent in the South West of France, captures the essence of the location. Hepher mixed soil from the French fields with his paint, creating a textural experience. For Hepher within the work, there is a heightened awareness of the passing of time, and of the region’s endurance, seen in the weathered fields, hills and trees. This element of nostalgia is highlighted in David Dawson’s June Storm in Wales, 2022. The painting possesses a deeply autobiographical quality, representative of Dawson’s formative childhood years in the Welsh countryside.
Artists: William Crozier, Ken Currie, David Dawson, Friedemann Hahn, David Hepher, Lucy Jones, Gerhard Neumaier, Tom Phillips, Bianca Raffaella, Gill Rocca, Tai Shan Schierenberg, Anna Maria Schönrock
