'The Lie of the Land: Representations of the South African Landscape'
Various Artists at Iziko Michaelis Collection at the Old Town House
Landscape is both the oldest and most popular genre in this country. Landscape painting and drawing commemorated the first contacts of European explorers at the Cape, and it is still widely practised throughout the country to this day. In this long history, the representation of landscape has taken many forms, not just because the physical geography of South Africa is so varied, but because different groups, and different individual artists, at different times, have wanted to communicate different things about their natural environment.
This exhibition is arranged in five sections to cover some of this wide range of purpose in landscape representation: from statements of awe in the face of a new landscape; to records of various methods of exploiting the landscape; to commemorations of struggles over possession of the landscape; to expressions of poetic or patriotic feelings through the medium of landscape; and to recent questionings of the very means of representing landscape.
10 June - 11 September













