The numerous historic definitions and interpretations of the concept of the “landscape” illustrate that the landscape is not a unified idea. Does it designate, quite simply, the gaze into an indeterminate and untouched nature? Is it a piece of land altered and settled by humans, a specific region, a characteristic vegetation? Or is the landscape, rather, purely a legacy from the history of ideas, to be taken in a figurative sense, as a metaphor? The concept of the landscape may be framed as a socially constructed perception of nature. Both the physical landscape and its portrayal in words, that is to say, are not fixed; they are apprehended, constructed, or accepted by human perception, revealing relation, dependency, the will to shape, and, ultimately, creativity. The exhibition at Galerie Nikolaus Ruzicska activates the traditional genre of the landscape beyond Romantic metaphors and enriches it with contemporary discontinuities, gathering selections from five oeuvres: HERBERT BRANDL, PHILIPP FÜRHOFER, FLORIAN MAIER-AICHEN, FRANÇOIS MORELLET, and HUBERT SCHEIBL. The specific constellation in the gallery rooms juxtaposes male artists from different generations who interrogate the subject of the landscape from diverse perspectives that are nonetheless firmly rooted in historical precedents.

What happens when the landscape is understood no longer as a likeness but as a construction? The works on view navigate between ideals the artists found in place and their subjective revision. They explore the landscape as a space of thought, a political terrain, and a field of aesthetic experimentation. In this way, the exhibition charts not just external spaces but internal ones as well— those mental geographies that inform our perception of the world. What come to light in these landscapes are veiled portraits of the present: fragile, hybrid, and unpredictable. Between erosion and invention, the subject appears to be less a classical motif than a principle that severs its ties to the role, backed up by a long tradition in art history, of a recognizable, animated natural landscape. Landscapes come to be understood as palimpsest-like superimpositions of states of affairs evolving into self-contained semitransparent objects—layers penetrated by the past as well as the present. Although each artist in the show has his own specific visual idiom, they all call naturalistic recognizability in question and carefully deconstruct it. HERBERT BRANDL’s works translate impulsive feeling into monumental spaces of color—the landscape becomes an inner scene projected into the outside world, where force of nature and painterly gesture are fused. PHILIPP FÜRHOFER blends painting and light art and fundamentally challenges the landscape’s claim to eternity and its Romantic promise of salvation in light of today’s global crises. He stages translucent stratifications and refractions of light in a landscape that is subject to continual ablation or attrition, while exposing what hides beneath its surface so as to unlock decidedly critical perspectives on its uses. FLORIAN MAIER- AICHEN activates defects and coincidences in the representation of the landscape by using expired analog films and photographic interventions, blurring the distinction between documentation and imagination. HUBERT SCHEIBL presents metaphysical spaces that transcend the bounded system of a landscape, intending not the imitation of an outward reality but the promise of an existence detached from the world. His infinite depth of space becomes the destination of a painterly voyage of discovery that mixes the sublime with meditative absorption. FRANÇOIS MORELLET, finally, translates the subject of the landscape into conceptual rigor and rhythmic structures that playfully experiment with perception and order.

Between landscape design, appropriation, and interpretation, the works reveal the landscape genre to be a product of human projection—never neutral, always filtered through the gaze of those who behold and shape it. A new topography emerges, a topography of vision that surveys not merely the territory but also the conditions of its perception. In this shift lies the genuine strength of a contemporary discourse of the landscape: it uncovers the conditions of its construction, elucidates the parameters of its function, and ultimately always tells us something about ourselves.