The Matter of Awe: Landscapes in Art

Landscapes, as a genre, have never merely been about depicting what the eye sees when gazing at a rustic parcel of land. Far from serving as an objective record of the earth, the landscape has long offered artists a powerful means of expressing aesthetic, spiritual, emotional, and political dimensions. It is also a genre where artists demonstrate their technical prowess and experiment with form. Through landscapes, we glimpse an artist’s interior world and motivations, and, in turn, discover new ways of seeing our own.

This exhibition explores three essential facets of the genre: seascapes, terrestrial landscapes, and skyscapes. The seascape captures emotional extremes — from the serene coastlines of Armand Merizon, evoking passivity and calm, to the violent, crashing waves of Childe Hassam, conveying nature’s untamable force and our own vulnerability in its wake. Skyscapes, meanwhile, emerge from the impulse to gaze upward in wonder. Their abstract forms and fleeting light have long fascinated artists, including Chris Stoffel Overvoorde, Ben Whitehouse, and Stephen Hannock, who reveal the fleeting beauty of the sky.