THE ARTIST ANSELM Kiefer is said to have remarked:

“I think there is no innocent landscape, that doesn’t exist.”

For what we see when we regard a landscape is the result of millions of years of geological and meteorological evolution as well many millennia of interventions by biological phenomena including human activities: both constructive and destructive. As the writer and academic Robert Macfarlane wrote:

“We live on a restless crust of earth. Behind the façade of stability, everything is shifting, imperceptibly, but continuously.”

 Artists have been creating images of landscape for many centuries. The earliest known depictions of landscape include Minoan frescoes created in about 1500 BC. The genre of European art called ‘landscape painting’ began in Holland in the seventeenth century. The website of the White Cube Gallery in Bermondsey noted in connection with this:

“17th-century Dutch artists of the Golden Age, during which the genre ‘landschap’ was first named, turned away from religious subjects as an expression of Protestant values …”

Until 7 September 2025, the White Cube at Bermondsey is hosting an exhibition called “Alien Shores”. Curated by Susanna Greeves, this show:

“… explores landscape as a place of memory, imagination, yearning and belonging. Through painting, video, photography and sculpture, the artists included offer speculative, symbolic or surreal depictions of emotional terrain and voyages of the imagination, visions of the distant past or possible futures.”

The exhibition includes works by 37 artists, all of whom worked in the twentieth and/or twenty-first centuries. It is a display of modern and contemporary works of art that either depict landscapes or try to evoke thoughts of landscapes. The works are distributed amongst three rooms. In the first two rooms there are videos and kinetic sculptures as well as paintings. A video by Noémie Goudal is particularly fascinating and dramatic. The third and largest room contains a mixed bag of paintings and a sculpture by Noguchi. My enjoyment of the paintings in this room was not 100%. Some of the paintings looked like wall space fillers rather than great works of art. However, it his is not a room to be missed because it contains three outstanding landscapes by Anselm Kiefer. Seeing these in the company of many of the others served to emphasize (to me) what a great contemporary artist he is. Other ‘stars’ in this room were paintings by Minoru Nomata, Georgia O’Keeffe and Marina Rheingantz.  A three-dimensional screen depicting a leafless forest by Eva Jospin in the long corridor of the White Cube also impressed me.

Although I wondered why a few of the artworks were included in the show, the Alien Shores exhibition has much to recommend it. It was fascinating to see how in a time frame of well under 100 years, artists have been tackling their various portrayals of landscape, and the interesting varieties of ways they have done it.