Lovely View

Lovely View, Way Out East, London, November 2022

Landscape, as an ever-present staple of image-making, functions as the archetypal image. In the reputational swing of John Constable’s paintings from avantgarde to chocolate-box kitsch, the legacy of landscape art is constantly shifting as its future states are continually evolving. Its definition may now be more elastic, but it still conjures up images of nature that have been mediated or processed; simultaneously real and artificial.

Despite its own fabricated construction, landscape functions as a marker of the ‘natural’ and the anthesis of the ‘unnatural’. Wrapped up in a symbiotic relationship with Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the Romantics’ obsession with a ‘return to nature’, this exhibition explores how landscape maps onto and continues to shape visual culture; exploring its semi-ironic appropriation in nostalgic online memes and the resurgent interest in pastoral mythology, its exploitation for touristic purposes, its ever-evolving role in ecological concerns, and its iconographic form in tracing the relationship between nature and artifice.

Artists - Yarli Allison, Blue Curry, Fiona Curran, Sam Carvosso, Líadáin Éire, Theo Ellison, Mandy Franca, Sam Laughlin, Sophie Rogers, Tom Sewell, George Shaw & An Ting Teng

Curated by Theo Ellison and Sam Carvosso.

Photography - Corey Bartle-Sanderson