The Trees, Light Green: Landscape painting – past and present

The typical landscape painter of the past depicted a seemingly unspoilt nature. From the very beginning, nature provided the backdrop on which gods and heroes were represented. A genre developed out of this in which nothing but nature was transferred onto the canvas. The expression ‘landscape’ denoted this art form, and was originally used when referring to Dutch paintings depicting natural settings. Thus from nature, culture was derived. A distinction was made between human and nature, and painting helped fortify the division between the two. The landscape became a sort of canvas upon which the artistic play of humanity was set.

Today we are acutely aware that climate change leaves no landscape untouched. Human life and the subsequent impact we have on the world are a deeply rooted part of the environment. We can no longer distance ourselves from nature, depicting it from afar. What does this imply for the future of landscape painting as a genre? And above all else, what can contemporary landscape painting mean for the environment it portrays? With this exhibition, Bonniers Konsthall sets out to grasp questions related to our historical and current relationship to nature via the artistic genre of landscape painting. Alongside historical work the exhibition shows a number of contemporary artists, all tackling the tradition of landscape painting in some way, and focusing their attention on nature and the environment. The exhibition offers us the chance to face our currently disappearing landscape, to see how it appears and how it is expressed. At times, the current climate catastrophe is obvious. At other times, not at all.

The landscape still remains a motif in contemporary art. The problems with the environment serves as the subject of a painting at times, but not always. However, whenever depicting nature today, contemporary artists must surely be aware that the landscape is undergoing a historical transformation. An underlying connection to the current climate catastrophe is inevitable, whether or not it is made visible in the work.

This exhibition primarily features our immediate environment. But as climate change is global, so too is the exhibition. Just like a fire that pays no heed to divisions between a national park and a cultivated forest, the climate could care less about regional boundaries and frontier lines. On the very same day this exhibition ends – on the 29^th of March, 2020 – humanity will have most likely have consumed this year’s resources. In other words, the natural resources our planet can produce in a single year will then be depleted. From that day on, we will be living off resources we essentially do not have. We take from future reserves that are diminishing by the minute. The planet itself, naturally, is anything but frail. It is rather we, pathetic latecomers, who arrived in the most recent microseconds of the planet’s history, that have constructed a system wreaking havoc. Without us, Earth would repair itself in time. To keep existing we must reassess how our system is currently prioritised, with economic growth prevailing over all else that grows. At one point in time, laws were put in place to enable industrial expansion. Many now believe we have enough information to regulate in the opposite direction.

Landscape painting has a great deal to say about how we look at the world now and how we have looked upon it in the past. It tells the tale of human and arts relationship to what we refer to as nature. Perhaps this exhibition can offer a space for reflection on this relationship, and help us to see that, as Swedish poet Göran Sonnevi writes, ‘The lives of humans are impossible without the light green hue that opens’.

Image: Sara-Vide Ericson, The Grave / The Marsh Report, 2017. Oil on canvas, 160×220 cm.