"SIGHT (UN)SCENE Contemporary Landscape" Exhibition
Benrimon Contemporary
This event has ended.
Benrimon Contemporary presents its first group exhibition of 2012, SIGHT (UN)SCENE, featuring paintings, photographs, works on paper and sculpture by a selection of international artists.
Historical landscape paintings call to mind bucolic yet contrived scenes where every tree, rock and cloud appear carefully placed to capture a pastoral moment in time. This exhibition challenges the notion of classical landscape art, exposing the unseen and forgotten, forcing the viewer to reconsider what defines this pillar of art history through a contemporary lens.
Landscape painting can be traced back to Greek and Roman antiquity, and became the platform for religious artwork in the western world through the 16th century. The prestigious European art academies resisted the genre because a hierarchy of subject matter placed historical, religious, and allegorical themes above all other subjects - portraits, still life, and landscapes were seen as inferior. During the 19th century the hierarchy of subjects crumbled and landscape painting gained a new supremacy in Europe and North America. Artists became less concerned with idealized, classical themes and focused on painting directly from nature. Revolutionary artists emerged, such as Gustave Courbet, who pushed boundaries with their radical painting techniques and paved the way for the next generation of painters, the Impressionists, to break from the academy.
Today artists continue to explore landscape as subject matter, but for different purposes. The landscapes are now manipulated, re-appropriated and re-imagined by contemporary artists to not only challenge the traditional trajectory of art history, but also to comment on the social and political forces that shape our surroundings. These ideas will be further explored through the works of gallery artists Shay Kun, whose paintings are both sublime and incongruent, Amanda Burnham’s urban landscape illustrations and Simon Patterson’s “Landskip” photographs. Dimitri Kozyrev’s paintings comment on man’s mental and physical impact on the environment and Trey Speegle’s playful pieces re-invent the landscape through a paint-by-number context. We will also introduce paintings by new gallery artist Christopher Mir, in addition to works by Jorge Mayet, Amanda Ross Ho, Tom Bamberger, Julia Oschatz and Kunié Sugiura.
Media
Schedule
from January 12, 2012 to February 18, 2012