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5/10/2007

A Mirror of Nature

SMK National Gallery of Denmark / Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen

Nordic Landscape Painting 1840-1910

What in fact is a landscape? What criteria does a portion of the earth's surface have to meet in order to be perceived as a landscape? And does landscape actually exist, other than as an idea in the mind of the beholder? What is it that creates our need to represent landscape in art, and what happens to it when it is depicted?

These are some of the questions that can arise as we look more closely at the shifting manifestations of nineteenth-century Nordic landscape painting.

"A Mirror of Nature" will explore Nordic attitudes to nature and the significance which landscape has had, and continues to have, in Nordic culture and thinking.

Landscape painting assumed particular importance around the middle of the nineteenth century, when landscape subjects became crucial symbols in the Nordic countries' search for national identity. At the same time, the landscape art of the region was open to wider European influences, evolving in a field of force between the national and the international.

The works included in the exhibition are grouped thematically under five headings: Nordic Sublime, Close to Nature, In the Open Air, Evocative Landscape and Landscapes of the Mind. By and large, this thematic structure also reflects the chronological development of landscape painting, from the heroic, romantic wildernesses of the 1840s to the dreamy, inward-looking mental landscapes of the turn of the century.

A Mirror of Nature is a collaborative venture of the Nordic national galleries in Helsinki, Stockholm, Oslo and Copenhagen. Featuring over a hundred high-class paintings by leading artists, it seeks to illuminate and discuss the distinctive Nordic contribution to the artistic representation of landscape in the nineteenth century.

Statens Museum of Art
Solvgade 48-50 - Copenhagen

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