From the museum website, 24 June 2009
Exclusive to the Art Gallery of South Australia, Making Nature explores the way in which European artists since the Renaissance have represented the landscape according to three different ideologies: the ideal, the romantic and the realistic. Through superb oil paintings, sculptures,
watercolors, prints, drawings and photographs from the collection of the Art Gallery of South Australia, visitors to this exhibition experience the emotive powers, serenity and poetry of nature.
Awaken your senses and imagination to the possibility, promise and thrill of nature and explore the works of the masters of the European landscape tradition through its greatest exponents: Titian, Claude Lorrain, Rembrandt, Joseph Wright of Derby, J.M.W. Turner, James McNeill Whistler, Eugène Boudin, Vanessa Bell, Lucien Pissarro, Nikolaus Lang and Andy Goldsworthy.
Curator of the exhibition and author of the accompanying book is Jane Messenger, the Art Gallery of South Australia’s curator of European Art. Messenger said “this survey of European landscape art offers a rare opportunity to see how artists have imagined nature through the ages, which has in turn influenced the way we see the world around us. As the twentieth-century German artist Paul Klee stated “art does not reproduce the visible; rather it makes visible”.
“The way the landscape is represented by the artist is dependent on his historical, political and cultural position, realizing the strong association between the making of art and the time during which it was made” Messenger said.
At a time when environmental issues are being so fiercely debated around the world, there is perhaps no better time to review how man has imagined or evaluated his relationship with nature and art through the ages.
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