Tate Liverpool: Radical Landscapes
Tate Liverpool
Tuesday – Sunday, 10:00 – 18:00
5 May – 4 September 2022
Sumptuous paintings and immersive installations featuring live plants, bring the great outdoors into the heart of Tate Liverpool.
Radical Landscapes is a major new exhibition exploring our connections to the rural landscapes of Britain. This immersive exhibition reveals how landscape art has become a progressive genre, with artists drawing new meanings from the land to convey questions of cultural belonging. Radical Landscapes presents rural spaces as sites of artistic inspiration, action and a heartland for ideas of freedom, mysticism, experimentation and rebellion.
The countryside has long been a focal point for artistic action and debates around civil freedoms. Key works looking at Britain’s diverse landscape histories include Two Figures (Menhirs) 1964 by Barbara Hepworth, Tacita Dean’s Majesty 2006 and Oceans Apart 1989 by Ingrid Pollard. Ideas about collective activism can be seen in banners, films, posters and photographs, such as the Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp banners by Thalia Campbell and video installations by Tina Keane.
The exhibition will also consider the human impact on the landscape and ecosystems. Radical Landscapes will feature works that reflect on the climate and its impact on the landscape including Gustav Metzger’s dazzling Liquid Crystal Environment 1965/2005 and Yuri Patterson’s sun[set] provisioning 2019.
The exhibition comes at a time when the Covid-19 pandemic has made us all reevaluate our relationship with the landscape, the accessibility of green space and the profound human need to connect and commune with land and nature.