Tate Liverpool offers a different landscape in 2022

Tate Liverpool is promising a radical re-evaluation of the tradition of landscape art in its summer 2022 blockbuster exhibition.

Radical Landscapes, which runs from May 5 to September 4, will bring together not Constables and Wilsons, but work from the last 100 years which reveals the social and cultural history of Britain through what curators call the themes of “trespass, land use and the climate emergency.”

Tate Liverpool director Helen Legg says: “It’s timely and relevant.

“It will ask questions around national identity, land ownership and climate change, and what landscape means to us today.”

Curator Darren Pih explains: “The exhibition mostly started to develop during the pandemic, in lockdown and unable to go to exhibitions, the great outdoors became very meaningful.

“It’s a major exhibition exploring a century of landscape art, and there are more than 100 works from the early 20th Century to today. It aims to reveal a never-before-told social and cultural history of Britain.

“It’s a political show.

Above: Tacity Dean Majesty 2006 © Tacita Dean, courtesy Frith Street Gallery, London and Marian Goodman Gallery, New York/Paris. Top: Peter Kennard, Haywain with Cruise Missiles 1980 © Peter Kennard

“How do we create a form of landscape art which speaks to and addresses the diversity of communities in modern Britain?”

Radical Landscapes will include painting, photography, film and multimedia works and large-scale installations including those with living plants.

It will be divided into three sections; trespass and contested boundaries, land use and identity and climate change and human impact on the landscape, with some of the major works including Peter Kennard’s 1980 painting Haywain With Cruise Missiles, Tacita Dean’s Majesty (2006) and Jeremy Deller’s Cerne Abbas (2019).

The show will also feature works by Derek Jarman, John Nash, Barbara Hepworth, Henry Moore, Edward Burra, Gustav Metzger, Michael Landy, Graham Sutherland, Anthea Hamilton, Ingrid Pollard and Superflux.

There will be a new commission by Davinia-Ann Robinson, while Ruth Ewan’s Back to the Fields 2015-22 will bring the Royal Albert Dock gallery to life through a living installation of plants, farming tools and the fruits of the land.

Radical Landscapes is at Tate Liverpool from May 5 to September 4, 2022. Tickets are £13.50.