Escape to the country

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Escape

An exhibition at Sumarria Lunn Gallery, 36 South Molton Lane, Mayfair, London W1K 5AB

‘Escape to the Country’, a phrase so well worn that it is now the  title of a TV programme, but do we ever really escape to nature?

This exhibition brings together five artists who explore our desire to escape to a landscape that we have tamed and recreated, both in reality and in representation. They challenge our perceptions and the foundations of landscape as an artistic genre.

The show will run from November to December at Mayfair’s Sumarria Lunn Gallery and includes new work by Alejandro Pintado, Gary Colclough, James Ireland, Bernadette O’Toole and Matthew Picton.

During the 18th century aristocrats employed the first landscape gardeners such as Capability Brown to create the ideal English countryside of their estates.

Like gardeners, artists have also manipulated and idealized nature for centuries. The landscapes painted by Gainsborough and Constable became portals for escapism as reality was tamed.

Paralleled by today’s picture postcards and holiday advertisements these flawless worlds form the basis of the landscape genre in art and still shape our relationship with the landscape today.

Alejandro Pintado

Drawing from traditional engravings Alejandro Pintado creates his own idealized monochromatic landscapes only to undermine them with conspicuous additions.

Seeking to excavate these idyllic, picturesque scenes Pintado exposes their falseness by introducing fluorescent scaffolds and architectural supports.

His intrusions suggest that these landscapes have always needed a constructed, man-made framework to maintain their illusion.

Gary Colcough

Mounted on wooden structures, Gary Colcough’s landscape drawings become sculpture. The fabrication of these manmade supports echo the construction of picturesque landscape images. Colcough manipulates his own landscape images by breaking photographic sources down into their component colours.

‘I think of this as a physical process, like peeling apart the pages of a book’, he says.

Drawing from just one of these colours, his monochromatic vignettes hark back to the engravings of centuries past, which first allowed the mass distribution of quaint landscape scenes and helped fuel the desire to escape to a nature edited by man.