SCAPE at & Gallery Australia

Do you remember how old you were when you first noticed a horizon?

With children everything is a new discovery, so their focus is often short sighted and scattered. As we get older, and our geographic situation changes we begin to slow down and look, looking beyond to the horizon line and finally seeing what lies between.

Although paintings from the earliest ancient and Classical periods included natural scenic elements, landscape as an independent genre did not emerge in the Western tradition until the Renaissance in the 16th century. In the Eastern tradition, the genre can be traced back to 4th-century. However Aboriginal artist have been depicting aerial landscapes for over 40,000 years with early depictions of water holes and rivers on caves, in sand and of course on bark.

Today, landscapes continue to be a major theme in art with many artists using documentary techniques such as video, photography and classification processes to explore the ways we relate to the places we live in and to record the impact we have on the land and our environment.

In the second half of the twentieth century, the definition of landscape was challenged. The genre expanded to include urban and industrial landscapes, and artists began to use less traditional media in the creation of landscape works. For example in the 1960s land artists such as Richard Long radically changed the relationship between landscape and art by creating artworks directly within the landscape. The & Gallery artists all look beyond and are creating landscapes within this long tradition. They help us see the landscape beyond the everyday, beyond our horizons.

In this exhibition we are focusing on the natural landscape with URBAN exhibition to follow.

Curator Julie Collins

For more information visit: https://www.andgalleryaustralia.net/