Until 11 May, Casa Asia and the Real Jardín Botánico-CSIC, with the collaboration of the Fundación ACS and ATT Técnicos de Teatro, present in the Pabellón Villanueva del Jardín (Plaza de Murillo, 2) the exhibition project Landscape culture: the mountain, the tree and the river. Derivations of the contemporary natural and urban landscape, between utopia and dystopia.
The exhibition brings together for the first time works by 25 contemporary Asian and Spanish artists, whose common thread is their personal interpretation of landscape, expressed in this exhibition through five formats: drawing, painting, photography, video and installation.
This exhibition project proposes a journey through the representation of landscape in contemporary art with a proposal that goes beyond the mere consumption of images. The sample raises essential questions about the relationship of humans with their environment and responsible participation in the preservation of the planet.
For Menene Gras Balaguer, curator of the exhibition, “the project stems from the interest that the landscape arouses in contemporary art globally and, respectively, the globalization of a phenomenon which makes landscape the object of an artistic and aesthetic discourse which is not alien to climate change or to the need to correct the impact of man’s action”. As the commissioner concludes: “Nature is not just a background on which we spend our lives. It is our home, our origin and our destiny”. In this sense, the exhibition not only brings together images for consumption, but “is an invitation to think about our role in preserving the world we inhabit”.
This project explores the different forms of landscape representation, covering both natural and urban environments. It is not just images for aesthetic contemplation, but a reflection on our relationship with the environment and the impact of human footprint in the territory. In contemporary art, landscape is not merely a visual representation of specific environments, but a set of discursive strategies that question individual existence as an indissociable social fact of the identity of the territory it occupies. As Gras Balaguer points out: “The landscape is inseparable from our existence; its destruction is also ours”.
