Reviewing Landscape: A Group Exhibition

Elmarsa Gallery brings together an eclectic group of classical painters alongside modern and contemporary artists whose practice explores landscape. The story of landscape painting is one of slow development, into distinct styles throughout time, with some of its iterations culminating out of antiquity and into the formation of classic and historic landscape. Spawning new ways of portraying geography through paths previously carved out by orientalist predecessors, painters versed in impressionist and expressionist practices expanded their milieu of carefully observing nature.

 

The promotion of Art Tourism, alongside the formation of associations such as the Tunisian Salon (est. 1894, the Society of French Orientalist Painters (est. 1893), and the Society of Algerian Artists and Orientalists (est. 1897), began a different conversation within painting, creating new possibilities for scholarship and education within the arts. With an established history of the Salon, the formation of artist groups such as the Groupe des Dix founded in Tunisia by artists including Moses Levy, incited clear narratives surrounding the necessity for establishing more intimate depictions of North African landscape. The composition of a landscape painting also evolved, inviting the integration of urbanism into the frame.

 

Contemporary artists working with the natively with geography have chosen more nuanced approaches to the realm of landscape, focused towards depicting the precariousness of historical narratives and the existence of human life.