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| Postmodern Pastoral |
| American art of the 20th century has focussed primarily on the urban experience,
the values and perspectives of the city. The natural world has, until now,
played a small role in the modern avant-garde imagination. However with the
relatively recent interest in environmentalism and the relativity of cultural
experience, landscape painting is undergoing something of a revival.
Three young painters of the moment who select and recombine old with new
formal language have succeeded in taking the venerable traditions of landscape
painting and putting them into play with larger more contemporary political and
social issues. In doing so, they have injected a new vitality and imagination into
the genre. The importance of memory, history, and fantasy in the observation
of the natural world are at the center of their practice.
Peter Edlund finds inspiration in the romantic sweep of 19th-century Hudson
River School paintings. By taking scenes of a benign, bucolic America as a
backdrop and inserting clues to a political or social climate very different from
that implied in the original canvasses, Edlund exposes a greater truth about the
visible world. In his newest painting for this exhibition Edlund draws from Thomas
Cole’s vision of primordial discord,”The Expulsion from the Garden of Eden”
(in the collection of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts) to reflect on contemporary
loss of innocence.
Suzanne Kuehn’s paintings and drawings of dense forest interiors and glacial
mountaintops allude to the dramatic linear exaggerations of German
expressionism, while adding a twist of the unexpected. Kuhn inserts kitschy
compositional devices and stylized flourishes that bring her moody vision of
romantic nature into alignment with post-modern sensibility.
The paintings of Whiting Tennis are informed by a nostalgia for rural America.
Using sheets of paper whose textures were made by woodcut printing and other
techniques, the artist composes scenes where weathered abandoned cabins,
sheds and farmhouses are engulfed by surrounding trees. Into this single simple
motif, Tennis recaptures a sense of past history and experience.
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