‘The Turning World’ investigates the relevance of contemporary landscape painting in relation to the art historical and our perception of it. Man’s relationship with the land is dependent on geographical location and historical context. Circa 10,000 BC Homo sapiens transitioned from roaming bands of hunter-gatherers to farming communities that settled in order to cultivate wheat. It is at this point that man began to fundamentally manipulate the landscape, and become reliant on a singular, fixed area. He learned to control the land, and the land came to control him.
In the Western art historical tradition, landscape painting evolved from being a background within which to set figures, into a subject in itself in the 16th century, specifically by artists such as Albrecht Altdorfer of the Danube School. By the 19th-century landscape painting had become the dominant European genre, being significantly availed by the occurrence of Romanticism. Depictions of nature became the vehicle by which Romantic painters could express notions of awe, individuality, emotion, and the sublime.
It is in this context that we ask, what is a landscape?
Featuring work by Peter Ashton Jones, Sam Douglas and Barry Thompson.
