For over two millennia the landscape has been an enduring subject for art.   As an artistic genre the image of  the natural world has been represented in a myriad of styles and media down through the ages from the Minoan frescoes (c. 1500 B.C.) that are some of the first examples of the naturalistic landscape to the exquisite Roman wall paintings of gardens from the house of Livia in Primaporta toward the end of the first century B.C.  One could cite numerous other examples of this tendency from all ages and from all cultures.  This last would include the great tradition of Chinese landscape painting especially during the Ch’ing dynasty  in the late seventeenth century  and the richly decorative Japanese screens of the Momoyama and Edo periods of  the 16th and 17th centuries.  In European art of the 18th and 19th centuries the landscape remained a central subject for the major movements of Romanticism and Impressionism; this is also true of the great innovations of  the early 20th century such as Fauvism and Cubism where nature is a ubiquitous image. This fascination with the natural world as the essential trope of  art continues to be explored into the 21st century and the epoch commonly referred to as the postmodern.

So what is it that constitutes a postmodern representation of  landscape?  What establishes this new visual and philosophical view of the natural world that in some way breaks with the past of this well rehearsed subject and  goes beyond the recent experimentations of the modern tradition?  In order to shed light on this question one has to look to the current state of nature itself and the shifting attitudes that inform artist’s  attempts to represent it. 

What can we call “natural” these days especially after the discursive investigations of  such contemporary theoreticians as Jean Baudrillard who posit a “landscape” of simulation, a hopelessly mediated reality as if we have returned to Plato’s Cave.  Or, Fredric Jameson’s disturbing analysis of  postmodern art as an endless repetition, a pastiche, with only irony as its last creative position. These few examples certainly give rise to a complex and often dystopic sense of  representing the natural world.  Today, in the postmodern, we often put “nature” in quotes.  We are unsure of what it is any longer or where it is, at least in some pristine state.  This new attitude has prompted several contemporary artists to question the current state of  nature through the genre of  landscape.  The important questions is:  How does an artist represent the 21st century world where nature is disappearing, a world of cloning, of bioengineering, of  nuclear energy, of persistent world terrorism, of global warming, in a two thousand year old form?  This is the major challenge for the contemporary artist whether they are exclusively landscape painters or have adopted the genre as a form of socio-political commentary. 

This exhibition focuses on the many stylistic ways that artists have explored these issues. The mediums of painting, drawing, and photography have been selected for logistical reasons.  There are obviously many works in other diverse media, both sculptural and time-based art, that reflect recent developments in this area.

Corey Postiglione is painter, critic, curator, and teacher living in Chicago.  He is Professor of Art History and Critical Theory at Columbia College Chicago.  His writing has appeared in numerous publications including Artforum, The New Art Examiner, C-magazine, and Dialogue.