Participating artists: Herbert Brandl, Heinz Greissing, Ines Lombardi, Alois Mosbacher, Otto Muehl, Eva Schlegel, Otto Zitko

Landscape In Your Mind is a new group exhibition exploring contemporary landscape painting and photography that will be on view through October 28. In the recent past, landscape has regained prominence as a subject matter in visual art. Challenged by the rise of art photography, painting has developed intriguing ways of breaking free from the grand romantic landscape tradition. The heightened sensibility for what’s behind the landscape has resulted in a bolder range of artistic expression, moving into figurative and abstract directions at once. Embracing landscape as a favorite theme, art photography, for its part, has added immediacy and novel perspectives to the depiction of landscape, paving the way for the rediscovery of landscape as a mirror of human civilization.

What promises to be an exquisitely “beautiful” show gradually reveals an undercurrent of discontent or uneasiness with the treatment of nature by man. Even a photograph rendering a serene landscape isn’t necessarily comforting anymore, but acts as a reminder of the brutal speed and thrust of progress. The definition of beauty is subject to change as well. Nowadays, landscape risks being substituted and relegated to the margins by sophisticated software programs and video games allowing everybody to relish in their spectacular pet landscapes and recreational environments aimed at surpassing the beauty of nature. Against this background, landscape is the perfect theme to position art as an antidote to the streamlined entertainment of our time, inspiring artists to develop strong individual approaches that may in turn inspire us.