LAND(E)SCAPES

From Petrarch’s ascent of Mont Ventoux to Joachim Patinir’s world landscapes, the history of landscape depiction in Western visual art is rooted, at least iconographically speaking, in the emotional portrayal of a mountain ascent.

Contemporary artworks, too, appeal to our sentiments, depicting places of sublimity and beauty, of silence and tranquillity; they document the drama of an untamed wilderness, which can be perceived ambivalently as both threatening and threatened; or they simply show the landscape – as a positive or critical statement on the existing status quo.

Excerpts from a text by Andrea Jünger