Opening Reception 6.30 – 8.30 pm Thursday 10 November • Curated by Davey Moor

Farmleigh Gallery and the Office of Public Works’s Art Management department are pleased to present a survey of works from the State Art Collection dealing with the Irish landscape. This selection is almost all from the last fifteen years, which has witnessed a burgeoning of the photographic arts in Ireland.

The land has never been represented objectively, and even the most unadventurous, chocolate box landscape is never neutral. That beauty is a human construct can help us understand the important distinction between ‘land’ and landscape. To say a pleasing scene is ‘picturesque’ is to acknowledge the weight of art history and its linguistic framing.

Since the fifties, art dealing with our ideas of landscape have grappled with our increasingly problematic relationship to nature. Issues surrounding the ubiquitous influence of human presence in nature are never out of the picture. Unlike other images, the vista of a landscape is almost always public, and common themes such as urban sprawl, movements in ecology, and our commodification of the environment all have a part to play in these studies. The artists in this exhibition deal with these topics, as well as addressing personal mythologies, topographical documentary, the country’s socio-political fabric, the nature of photographic vision, and typographies; looking at both microcosms that lead the mind to amplify to vaster ‘scapes, and wide vistas reduced to specifics, creating their own – sometimes personal and often humorous – symbology.