Speakers: Nicholas Alfrey, Rebecca Partridge
With the emergence of Land art in the 1960s and 70s painting seemed to have been super-ceded as a vehicle for seriously engaging with landscape, with landscape painting now a discredited, or at least marginal, genre. But in recent years landscape painting has again become a vital arena, and one which is, perhaps unexpectedly, inflected by the legacy of Land art itself.
This session explores some of the implications of this post-conceptual turn through the lens of Rebecca Partridge’s evolving practice as artist, curator and writer. We begin by going back to 'Scaling the Sublime: Art at the Limits of Landscape', an exhibition we co-curated for the Djanogly Gallery in 2018, in which Rebecca showed her sequence of paintings 30 Day Sky Studies. We go on to discuss her most recent exhibition, co-curated with Joy Sleeman for Hestercombe in 2022, 'Expanded Landscapes: Painting after Land art', particularly in relation to her interest in meta-modernism as a critical framework. This framework is arguably applicable to Land art as a historical phenomenon, but also points a way forward to the development of an embodied, non-essentialist, decolonised and outward-looking approach to painting and landscape.
Speaker biographies
Nicholas Alfrey is Honorary Research Associate in the Department of Cultural Media and Visual Studies. His interests are in landscape since 1800 as a genre that continually crosses media boundaries, and in the legacies of Romanticism in British art. Exhibitions he has co-curated include 'Mapping the Landscape', 'Art of the Garden', and 'Uncommon Ground: Land art in Britain, 1966-79'.
Rebecca Partridge is an artist currently based in London. She has exhibited widely internationally, and international scholarships include the Nordic Kunstnasenter Dale, the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, USA and the Terra Foundation for American Art (summer Fellowship in Giverny, France). She has curated a series of exhibitions in Germany, Norway and the UK, and published in journals including Berlin Art Link, Hyperallergic, Sculptorvox and Journal of Contemporary Painting. She is Associate Lecturer in Painting at Camberwell College of Arts, UAL.