With works by: Alkan Avcıoğlu, Jessica Auer, Julius von Bismarck, Sven Drühl, Ornella Fieres, Philipp Fürhofer, Noémie Goudal, Beate Gütschow, Simone Haack, Michelle Jezierski, Friedrich Kunath, Hiroyuki Masuyama, Mike Strauch, Troika

Curated by Marc Wellmann and Asja Wolf
 
The exhibition On Landscape brings together international artists who renegotiate the theme of landscape within the field of tension between ecological, technological, and social questions. Two forces are at the center: on the one hand, the overexploitation of global resources, encapsulated in the concept of the Anthropocene; on the other, the growing power of the digital realm, accelerated by artificial intelligences that increasingly permeate everyday life and artistic practices.

Nature has never been a neutral object of depiction. Ever since landscape painting emerged as an independent genre in the 14th century, it has been a cultural construct. Whether as an idealized idyll, untouched wilderness, or a space of economy and culture — landscape has always served as a projection surface. This appropriation reached its peak in the Romantic era of the 19th century, which exalted nature in quasi-religious terms under the concept of the Sublime. Contemporary perspectives are measured against this legacy.

How do artists today engage with nature in an age of climate change, overpopulation, pollution, and unchecked growth? Landscapes can serve as testimonies of ecological guilt in the so-called "Age of Man" — and at the same time, as places of escape for the longing for a better world. Humanity has shaped, exploited, and destroyed nature. And yet it still seeks redemption in it. It dreams of Arcadia, which never truly existed. Of Paradise, which always meant gardens, never primeval forests. And artists still set out: to the poles, into the rainforest — in search of a posthuman experience.

But what happens when landscape itself becomes artificial? When it consists of algorithms, data, and AI-generated simulations? The exhibition asks whether such artistic landscapes are merely mirrors of our alienation — or whether they hold utopian potential. On Landscape focuses consistently on the landscape genre and presents it across different media: from sczulpture, painting and photography to video.

From April to early November 2027, the exhibition will be presented at Tyrol Castle – the South Tyrol Museum of Cultural and Regional History. This deliberate shift of context is intentional: the urban experience of viewing the exhibition in the German capital will give way to the mountain panorama of the Dolomites, against which the exhibited works will have to assert themselves in a fundamentally different manner. At Tyrol Castle, it is also planned to juxtapose the contemporary works with historical representations of landscapes.