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Remembering, envisioning, sensing landscape

British artist Darren Almond (b. 1971) works in a variety of media including photography, film, installation, sculpture and painting. His diverse subjects deal with abstract ideas of time, space, history and memory and how these concepts relate and intersect. He examines the symbolic and emotional potential of objects, places and situations to produce works that have historical as well as personal resonance.

Almond’s work often begins with travel to remote locations that are motivated by specific political, cultural or geographical investigations. In the ‘Fullmoon’ photographs, a series that the artist begun in 1998, he photographed diverse landscapes in every continent of the world under moonlight, using long exposures, to create images that seem to uncannily replace night with day. Almond’s films deal with personal and political subjects. In Bearing, for example, he follows the daily trek of a sulphur miner in Indonesia, while in In the Between, he films the controversial high-altitude train line built from China to Tibet. In his sculptural work, Almond often materialises notions of time as both a real and imagined construction. His large-scale, wall-mounted flip clocks, for example, emphasise the passing of time with their amplified sound as well as the impossibility of its mechanical quantification.

‘In practice, the allure of Almond’s artwork transcends the overt splendour of the views. It transpires in the artist’s underlying method, which is aesthetically fuelled by the exploration of time. How might an artist, in this day and age, depict temporality? What are the methods and means for visually representing the notion and experience of time? The answer resides in Almond’s distinct and complementary practices, which involve time in various guises: retransmitted, distorted, delayed, real, subjective or frozen.’

V. Souben in Darren Almond: ...between here and the surface of the moon, FRAC Auvergne, 2011

Glenn Brown’s (b. 1966) practice is one in which concerns of a technical, aesthetic and spiritual nature are explored through an eclectic mix of influences. Spanning painting, drawing and sculpture, the artist reflects upon the history of art without confining himself to a specific period. The sources for his works can be found in the works of Old Masters such as Rembrandt and Adolph von Menzel, Surrealists – especially Salvador Dalí – or artists including Karel Appel, Frank Auerbach and Georg Baselitz, as well as sci-fi painters such as Chris Foss. Deliberately drawing from reproductions, Brown manipulates this imagery, often beyond recognition, before transposing them into works of an unparalleled uncanniness, where colours and forms undergo further re-assessment.

Brown could be perceived as the ultimate Mannerist painter, perplexing the viewer with distorted, exaggerated and sometimes grotesque forms. His technical virtuosity is captivating. Executed in the traditional medium of oil paint, his paintings act as trompe-l'oeil, showing swirls of colour which at first glance seem to form a thick impasto, until surfaces reveal themselves to be actually smooth. Both alluring and unsettling, ranging from monstrous to melancholic, Brown’s paintings – like his drawings and sculptures – broadcast a pronounced indifference to common distinctions between good and bad taste, or beauty and abjection.

‘Everything oozes majestically. The paintings and sculptures of Glenn Brown are deliquescent in the physical sense of the term, the property possessed by certain solid substances of slow liquefaction by gradual absorption of atmospheric humidity. Description of this now jubilant, now morbid magma gives rise to an unending, indeed unbearable succession of sugarcoated adjectives, adverbs and nouns. One can come at these paintings only tentatively, by narratives and descriptions, by impressions, by repetitions and sonorities and by the contradictions in which they are so rich. Any language that can encompass the work of Brown must necessarily be vague, full of double-talk and ambiguity, for this is the way in which the artist treats images.’

J.M. Gallais, ‘Exquisite Deliquescence’ in Glenn Brown, exh. cat., Berlin: Galerie Max Hetzler and Holzwarth Publications, 2011

Fusing European Expressionism with American popular culture, André Butzer (b. 1973, Stuttgart) has painted his way through the artistic and political extremes of the 20th century – life, death, consumption and mass entertainment – into the 21st century. With wide ranging influences including Paul Cézanne, Edvard Munch, Henri Matisse, as well as Walt Disney and Henry Ford, Butzer has developed a unique and elaborate fictitious universe.

Many iconic characters have come to populate Butzer’s ‘Science Fiction-Expressionism’ with their recognisable large comic-book eyes, inflated heads or oversized hands. First appearing in 1999, these bright figures and shapes continue to lure the viewer in subsequent bodies of work. Engaging with the fundamental dimensions of colour, light and painterly expression, Butzer’s practice has shifted through the seemingly utter blackness of his N-Paintings, to a return to vibrancy, following his move to California between 2018 to 2021. Painting en plein air year-round, these recent works vibrate with a bold, energetic force.

Since the 1970s, Carroll Dunham (b. 1949) has developed a unique pictorial language in a significant oeuvre encompassing painting, drawing, print and sculpture. Employing a formal mastery of line, texture and colour, Dunham’s distinctive body of work continually engages new and recurring modes of art-making.

Drawing on the art historical canon but also on pop culture including sci-fi and cartoons, Dunham revisits enduring themes that comprise our existence – trees, guns, the planet, bathers and wrestlers amongst others – while simultaneously exploring the formal attributes of painting. Riding the line between abstraction and figuration, planes of strong colour and Dunham’s curvilinear line activate the energetically-charged works.

Through anthropomorphic forms, vivid abstractions, surreal landscapes and archetypal figures, the artist demonstrates his fascination and unique ability to play with scale, orientation and composition to give physical form to psychologically challenging imagery. Dunham’s careful choreography provides insight into his subjects’ complex internal world.

‘Dunham’s paintings conjure everyday realities as both more and less than real; the so-called ordinary is unfamiliar, new terrain, politically, sexually, environmentally. Fictional portraits of the known moving into an unknown, they show vivacity, even about the incapacity to know the future. I mean, they have a vitality, these frank, beautiful misfits, or funny, smart disturbances. Not stories but wordless pictures.’

L. Tillman, 2016

Over a career spanning five decades, Günther Förg (1952–2013) developed a distinctive and prolific body of work, including experiments in abstraction and monochrome painting, against the general trend of figurative painting predominant in Germany in the 1980s. Wall paintings, sculptures, large format photographs, portraits and architectural views, as well as drawings and graphics, executed in a range of mediums, bear witness to the innovative diversity of the artist’s approach. Universal concepts of form, mass, proportion, rhythm and structure constitute a common thread in his work. From the late 2000s, Förg’s painting took a brighter and more gestural turn, resulting from an intuitive approach to colour and composition.  

‘Art, artists, architecture, landscapes, films and literature are all constant sources of inspiration for Günther Förg, and the notion that art is generally more likely to be derived from other art than from nature comes through in his various work cycles and series as well. His spontaneity of conception and dynamic gesture is contrasted with complex references and their associated meanings. Förg is concerned with self-reflecting experience and self-analysis in painting. By referring to the most diverse of artists from widely varying eras and styles of the 20th century, he brings out individual positions that were arguably of unparalleled relevance to artistic practice in subsequent decades, while at the same time he links periods and ideologies that were often mutually contradictory.’

B. Reiss, Günther Förg: Paintings, Walls, and Photographs in Günther Förg 1987–2011, exh. cat., Berlin: Galerie Max Hetzler and Holzwarth Publications, 2012

One of the most important painters of today, Katharina Grosse (b. 1961, Freiburg im Breisgau, Germany) is internationally recognised for her bold, haptic paintings and saturated use of colour. Since the late 1990s, Grosse has employed a spraying technique to attack, redefine and subvert traditional notions of painting. Her kaleidoscopic vision spills into the physical world, sweeping across walls, floors, ceilings, everyday objects and sculptural structures. Through this radical inclusion of space as a field of action, the artist achieves a paradoxical clash of the expansion of colour with our material existence. Tracing the artist’s thought process or gaze, colour takes on a lifeforce of its own.

Parallel to her in-situ works, the artist continues to pursue her studio paintings. In her most recent canvases, vibrant loops of colour float, almost three-dimensionally, over white ground. As the colours intertwine like loose strands of thread, the paintings record Grosse’s ongoing reflections on density and velocity. Such works present a radical compression of movement and colour, creating the largest amount of action and entertainment possible over the smallest amount of surface. 

‘Paint as materiality and color as immediate chromaticity; raw industrial paints; complex layers of color and their various factual and optical entanglements; the use of stencils; the expansion of the painting beyond the boundaries of the canvas – these are some of the most significant methods through which Grosse creates structural openness but also startling fissures and ruptures. Rooted in process and experiment, chance and control, Grosse’s paintings frequently hover between form and dissolution of form and the liminal spaces in between, evoking perceptual uncertainties that are immersive and distracting at once. Ultimately, her paintings remain hermetic, resisting translation into language and narration.’

S. Eckmann, ‘Introduction’, in Katharina Grosse: Studio Paintings 1988–2022, exh. cat., Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, St. Louis, Missouri, and travelling; Berlin: Hatje Cantz, 2022, p. 13

Friedrich Kunath (b. 1974) creates works which converge the banal with the extraordinary, embracing counterpoints and uncovering universal emotional experiences such as loss, hope, fear, celebration and love. Often taking the form of idealised landscapes layered with poetic phrases, works by Kunath have been known to feature anything from a postcard to a perfume scent, pulling from a vortex of references.

Kunath’s oeuvre spans painting, drawing, installation, sculpture and video. Informed by the artist’s own personal history, but also music, German Romanticism and American pop culture, the works are imbued with both tradition and modernity. With an equally diverse subject matter, they illustrate themes of tragedy, comedy and romance, freely shifting between the three and occupying a unique space between irony and sincerity.

‘This sense of homesickness permeates my complete oeuvre – this aspect of the ambiguity of our existence. To paint or to make these works is to feel at home. To feel found, to feel understood.’ 

F. Kunath in conversation with K. Bech Dyg, ‘Friedrich Kunath – The Way I Work’, for the Louisiana Channel, 2021

Known for his large-scale paintings of architecture and nature, Jake Longstreth (b. 1977) recounts the changing modern landscapes of our time. Astutely observing the corners of suburban America, the artist primarily documents restaurant and retail chains, immortalising many which are becoming increasingly obsolete. In his nature landscapes, Longstreth’s equally subtle and elegant compositions reveal location-specific trees, foliage and clouded skies. With a sense of anticipatory nostalgia and a wry, underlying humour, the artist takes a place within the tradition of landscape painting to uncover both the beauty and absurdity of storefront culture, as well as the creeping effects of a changing environment.

Jake Longstreth’s paintings do far more than capture the forgotten facades of retail chains. They remember a part of suburban life that’s drifting into the past.

T. Latterner, ‘Meet the Artist Chronicling Disappearing Chain Stores’ in Architectural Digest, 21 August 2020.

‘[...] Schnabel is an extraordinary transformer, making history out of the everyday and making the familiar historic. It requires a body of work that has a strong metaphoric quality, an art that is about illusion, association, imagination. Even when his paintings are most abstract they are all about content, history, and emotion. Expertly installed and linked with their surroundings Schnabel's work can bring about the utmost stereophonic impact on the emotional state of all, the architecture, the painting, and the viewer.’

M. Hollein, Paintings and Their Surroundings in Summer. Julian Schnabel. Paintings 1976–2007, Skira, 2007

The work of Ida Tursic (b. 1974) and Wilfried Mille (b. 1974) expresses a deep engagement with today's forms of image representation. Found in magazines and the enormous data pool of the internet, anonymous pictorial material is being transformed into the traditional domain of painting. Obscene pornography, film scenes of burning houses, landscapes as well as mere abstract and geometrical elements – the subjects depicted illustrate the common overload of image production circulating through present media. Often alienated by overlapping layers of paint or interrupted by various patterns these paintings deal with the manipulation, re-utilisation and disappearance of images.

‘Something in the painting of Ida Tursic and Wilfried Mille makes us beautiful, and turns us into worthy onlookers. Herein lies the 'intangible' part of the oeuvre of Ida Tursic and Wilfried Mille. It is in the nature and making of this relationship which links us to it. And if this painting leaves plenty of room for tangible things, but does not assign them any place in particular, this is because its project is elsewhere: in the on-going quest for ways of expressing this intangible part which alone sets works of art apart from ordinary things, and makes a distinction between pictures and paintings.’

É. Troncy, ‘This Painting’ in Ida Tursic & Wilfried Mille. Decade, Les presses du réel, 2011

Bridging the potential and the impossible, Rinus Van de Velde (b. 1983) tells a tale of imagined histories, of fictional autobiographies and fantastic encounters. Spanning various media from drawing and painting to installation and film, Van de Velde is known for his witty commentary and meticulous use of charcoal on large-scale canvas. 

Rinus Van de Velde’s narrative style balances between truth and imagination, which is reflected in the intricate interplay of light and shadow in his work. Convinced that art is not born of one sole truth, through his works, Van de Velde aims to open a multiplicity of realities to his audience. Inhabiting these worlds, the artist often depicts himself as the protagonist, whether sat in an armchair smoking or dressed as a star tennis player. 

Since the late 2010s, Van de Velde complements his signature monochrome palette with faded and subdued shades, becoming increasingly more saturated over time. In recent years, the artist has focused on a new body of work in colour, beginning with small-scale pencil drawings, which have evolved into larger compositions in vibrant oil stick. Fascinated by the spontaneity of drawing, Van de Velde embraces the medium’s mischievous, chaotic qualities, transcribing this spirit onto a large scale that, in its grandeur, is reminiscent of traditional oil painting. Unlike painting, forever condemned to the burden of making definite statements, Van de Velde sees in drawing the possibility of ‘designing your world’. 

‘My work is always based on fiction, placed alongside reality. It is about the truth and a lie. Where is the real in all of it? And this is interesting I think, for me to mix it all up. I don’t think it is as interesting to say (what is and isn’t real) this is the truth. I don’t wish this, because I am not an authority on the truth. I don’t want to be in that position, and the same of what I said about making statements in painting, I am not that kind of artist who is going to make an assertion and say that this is how the world is now. I like that everything is much more ambivalent and that there is hesitation, it is false or fact? The lie is much more interesting I think than telling the truth.’

R. Van de Velde in conversation with R. Punj ‘Living a Lie. An interview with Rinus Van de Velde’, in Art&Deal, 2020

In the midst of the ever-changing and often corporate-produced archetypes of the modern woman, the paintings and drawings of Grace Weaver (b.1989) tell honest stories which are in equal parts revealing and introspective. The artist often works with the concept of the watched female – sometimes joined by a male onlooker or captured in a net of social interactions – navigating the complexities of urban life. Like a psychological archive of daily activities, Weaver’s work mainly chronicles female experiences, in both the private and public realm.

Painting only from a physical scale that matches or supersedes her own, Weaver imagines figures which are long-limbed and heavily layered with colour, both confronting and relating to the viewer. Abounding with art historical references spanning from Mannerism to Rococo, Weaver’s compositions revive and challenge the tradition of genre painting in contemporary form. Communicating themes of the mundane, the melancholic and the emotional, Weaver takes that which is personal, transforming it into universally recognisable visual narratives.

‘…Grace Weaver closely examines her own surroundings, her generation, our time. She is interested in that which is typical of the now, but after all she creates images like never before. For all the smartphones, to-go cups, avocado toasts, baby slings, and other fashion accessories, hers is a painting of subtle gestures, poses, and gazes, in which everything is lifted out of time and space by flat and boldly colored backgrounds, as in the golden grounds of early Christian icons.’

A. Deiss and G. Wagenfeld-Pleister, ‘Allegories of the Now: Introducing Grace Weaver’, in Grace Weaver, exh. cat., Kunstpalais Erlangen, Erlangen; Oldenburger Kunstverein, Oldenburg; Bielefeld: Kerber Verlag, 2020, p. 8

Toby Ziegler (b. 1972) brings together motifs derived from a wide range of sources, including photographs of the Freud family, Spanish still-life paintings, Dutch Old Masters and Nineteenth Century landscape paintings. He uses the computer to generate new forms and pictorial spaces, playing with facetted structures for his sculptures and manipulating layers of pattern for his two dimensional works. The physical realisation of these digital forms allows mistakes and idiosyncrasies to creep into the rigorous schematic process and to erase the clear distinction between figuration and abstraction. Toby Ziegler revels in the slippage between the virtual and the actual, and furthermore in the very physical acts of decomposing, distorting, and damaging the materials. While Ziegler provides the viewer with some access to follow his path he intentionally leaves room for personal interpretation.

‘As a process, the enlargement of pixelated, discoloured images seems almost automatic in Ziegler – as if no new voice could be imparted to an image before it had passed through a singular neutralising filter. [...] The metal ensures a very specific form of paint adhesion and drying; it retains the trace of every brushstroke, whose nuances stand out at each transition. [...] Yet these operations would mean nothing without a further process, one that comes into effect after the first layer of paint has been painstakingly laid down. Of course, it is thought through from the start with the aid of a computer used to elaborate the composition. This second stage can be perceived as a kind of sabotage – though without it the painting would not be complete. Ziegler now sprays the painting, authoritatively superimposing a pattern over the motif.’

J.M. Gallais, in Toby Ziegler: Borderline Something, Galerie Max Hetzler and Holzwarth Publications, 2013