Shifting Perspectives: New Views on Landscape

Far from neutral, landscape paintings have always shaped and been shaped by contemporary concerns. Shifting Perspectives: New Views on Landscape showcases abstract works made over the last three decades by artists who upend and amend the conventions of landscape art. The resulting representations evoke natural and fabricated environments as a means of contemplating our individual and collective experiences of such spaces.

The gallery highlights two new acquisitions, Elias Sime’s Untitled 4, 2020, and Fight or Flight, 2018, by Shara Hughes, as well as paintings by Julie Mehretu and Hock E Aye Vi Edgar Heap of Birds. Depicting unconventional views of the land—overhead, submerged, or fragmented—these works demonstrate how understandings of place are strongly shaped by perspective, whether personal and subjective or based in shared tradition. In some works, found materials and imagery sourced from across the world locate the places represented at the intersection of local and global, familiar and nonspecific. In others, the absence of a horizon line resists the colonialist and imperialist notion of surveying—in order to take possession of—territory as far as the eye can see.

Shifting Perspectives: New Views on Landscape is curated by Molly Moog, research assistant for modern and contemporary art, and Hannah Klemm, associate curator of modern and contemporary art.

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