Landscape Confection

by Helen Molesworth (Contributor), Tracey Emin

Landscape Confection brings together a group of emerging and mid-career artists involved in expanding the historical practice of landscape painting. Long considered one of the primary categories of Western painting, landscape has traditionally been dialectically structured by the production of either realistic or idealized representations of the natural world. The artists in Landscape Confection work in the realm of imaginary landscape. Many of the paintings derive from the unconscious space of dreams, some borrow from the discipline of topography, and still others reside at the boundary between landscape and abstraction. Most of the pictures have a high degree of whimsy and call to mind the f'êtes galantes of Watteau, redolent as they are with bodily and visual pleasure. Artist included in the exhibition and catalogue are Rowena Drig, Pia Fries, Jason Gubbiotti, Jim Hodges, Katie Pratt, Michael Raedecker, Neil Rock, Lisa Sanditz, Amy Sillman and Janaina Tschape.

100 pages, Hardcover

First published January 2, 2005

About the author

Helen Molesworth is Chief Curator at the Institute for Contemporary Art, Boston. She edited Louise Lawler's "Twice Untitled and Other Pictures (looking back)", published by the Wexner Center for the Arts and distributed by the MIT Press.