Gallery: ‘Landscape, abstracted’ at the MFA Boston

From the first experiments with aerial perspective, to the Impressionists’ revision of painted light, to modernist records of the creeping modernisation of the 20th-century countryside, landscape has long been a popular and enduring genre in art. The MFA Boston’s permanent collection includes a wide variety of historic landscape paintings and drawings, but its latest exhibition looks to the contemporary scene. Where can today’s landscape artists – faced with a contemporary world that is often aggressively globalised, littered with cities and enveloped by the digital cloud – venture next?

The 10 contemporary art works in ‘Landscape, abstracted’ celebrate the beauty, power and intricacy of the natural world, but approach it sidelong through a series of combinations, contrasts and fragmentations. One new commission, an enormous wall painting by Jason Middlebrook, seems to feed the landscape through a prism, or perhaps some early computer program, fragmenting it into patterned lines that could be barcodes or woodgrain. Another, by Anne Lindberg, extends coloured threads across the gallery space, suspending a landscape in the air. Tara Donovan creates an cumulus cloud out of Styrofoam cups; Teresita Fernández cuts soft, moss-like patterns into sharp metal; Barbara Gallucci conflates garden furniture with the nearby hedge.

Click on any image to open the slideshow.

'Garrowby Hill' (1998), David Hockney. Juliana Cheney Edwards Collection, Seth K. Sweetser Fund, and Tompkins Collection—Arthur Gordon Tompkins Fund © David Hockney. Photo © MFA Boston
Preparatory sketch for the mural 'Tread Lightly' (detail; 2014), John Middlebrook. Courtesy of Jason Middlebrook, Monique Melouche Gallery, Chicago and Lora Reynolds Gallery, Austin
'Ghost (Vines)' (2013), Teresita Fernández. Courtesy of the artist and Lehmann Maupin, New York and Hong Kong. Photo by Will Lytch © 2013 Teresita Fernández
'TBD' (conceptual drawing; 2014), Anne Lindberg. Courtesy the artist © Anne Lindberg
'Topia Chair' (2008), Barbara Gallucci. Doran Family Fund for Contemporary Artists created in memory of Stephen D. Paine. Reproduced with permission. Courtesy of Barbara Gallucci and Carroll and Sons Gallery
'Untitled' (2003), Tara Donovan. Gift of Gail and Tony Ganz, reproduced with permission. Photograph © MFA Boston

‘Landscape, abstracted’ is at the MFA Boston from 16 August 2014–30 July 2017.

The post Gallery: ‘Landscape, abstracted’ at the MFA Boston appeared first on Apollo Magazine.

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