Overview
Pilar Corrias is pleased to present a focused presentation of new work exploring the influence of early modern British landscape painting on Sholto Blissett, Rachel Rose and Georg Wilson. The works in this presentation draw on associated tropes from this period of art history, conjuring alternative and distorted visions of our living environment.
Pilar Corrias is pleased to present a focused presentation of new work exploring the influence of early modern British landscape painting on Sholto Blissett, Rachel Rose and Georg Wilson. The works in this presentation draw on associated tropes from this period of art history, conjuring alternative and distorted visions of our living environment.
Sholto Blissett's imagined landscapes question preconceived notions about the natural world, prompting viewers to reconsider inherited ideas and categories that shape our understanding of nature and the wilderness. Building upon the traditions of landscape painting, Blissett approaches nature as an unfolding process rather than a fixed scene, where change occurs in rhythms and forces far beyond human perception. In this body of work, Blissett explores landscape as a site of flux, where excitement and fear intertwine with a romantic nostalgia, unfolding across timeless horizons.
Spanning film, painting, drawing and sculpture, Rachel Rose's work traces the ways landscapes shape human experience and how the stories and belief systems we weave are born from them. In The Rest, Rose draws on the canon of paintings depicting the Holy Family resting during their flight into Egypt, reimagining the scene through Mary's perspective and relocating it in present landscapes. The series moves from dawn to night, and Rose's smearing, blurring and flashes of focus within the paintings illustrate the suspension of time, making that as much the subject of the paintings as the landscape itself. Nature appears fluid and changing, seen through the eyes of a mother in love.
Drawing inspiration from English folklore, art history, poetry and ecology, Georg Wilson's paintings imagine an alternative natural world in which humanity is absent. Wilson interrogates the historic legacy of landscape painting defined by artists such as Thomas Gainsborough, challenging the romanticised vision of the English countryside. Instead of 'green and pleasant' pastoral scenes, Wilson's compositions are inhabited by wild creatures that are entangled with nature, inviting us to consider a non-human perspective. Influences from Samuel Palmer to Richard Dadd inform the artist's approach to colour and form, while Wilson's unique approach to texture and mark-making enriches her world-building, unifying its surfaces, forms and beings.
