From the museum website, 25 February 2014
It is hard to imagine visual art without landscape. It shows us the world views of artists and patrons, and their social context. The representation of one’s own surroundings often functions as a sounding board for individual emotions and for social movements. Whereas landscape in early art was originally depicted as a secondary matter and later on as a grand and dominant subject, in modern and contemporary art there is often a focus on the destructive presence of mankind. It is these surprising twists and turns that feature in the exhibition. The story begins with the origins of the landscape as an independent genre and ends with today’s photographic and video art, looking at all the developments along the way.
Weltsichten: The landscape represented in six centuries of art is a collaboration Situation Kunst (for Max Imdahl), a part of the art collections of Ruhr-University Bochum and the Bonnefantenmuseum.