Julius von Bismarck
Landscape Painting
Apr 23 – May 22, 2021
Sies + Höke, Düsseldorf, Germany

Where does our perspective on nature come from? Is it determined in part by how art presents it to us? In his works, Julius von Bismarck researches processes of perception which shape our understanding of the natural. He has used direct confrontation with natural phenomena in various ways: by filming forest fires and raging hurricanes or by redirecting lightning. The drastic inclusion of himself as an artist is almost always essential for him.

In his Landscape Painting realised in 2021, Julius von Bismarck creates a picture not of, but in the volcanic landscape he has chosen. He thereby eliminates the dividing line between the artist subject and the object to be painted: instead of creating a distance in order to place the landscape as a miniature within the painting, he enters it, dissolves the distance to his image, attempts to master its size and physically confronts its monumental dimensions in order to finally conquer it. The resulting picture of the landscape, created by this brutal encounter and performed through the body, becomes proof of this struggle with the subject and shifts the topos of an artist’s inner struggle with his objects to the exterior.

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