Romance, Regret, and regeneration in landscape
September 18 - December 13, 2025
Megs Morley and Tom Flanagan, A History of Stone, Origin and Myth (still), 2016. Film with sound. Courtesy of the artists.
The Shelley & Donald Rubin Foundation is pleased to present Romance, Regret, and Regeneration in Landscape, a group exhibition exploring nature in contemporary practices, ranging from the poetic to the political. According to Thomas Cole, 19th century painter and founder of the Hudson River School, “To walk with nature as a poet is the necessary condition of a perfect artist.” His words could equally describe the ideal state of being for an environmental activist. The exhibition will run at the 8th Floor from September 18 to December 13th, 2025.
Artists on view: Francis Alÿs, Joseph Beuys, the Boyle Family, Chagos Research Initiative, Anya Gallaccio, Michele Horrigan, Sanam Khatibi, Ishmael Marika, Megs Morley and Tom Flanagan, Richard Mosse, Winfred Rembert, Alexis Rockman, Clement Siatous, and Yang Yongliang
Romance, Regret, and Regeneration in Landscape charts philosophical developments beginning with Edmund Burke’s theories of the sublime and beautiful, the European Romantic movement, post-industrial detachment from ecosystems, and our current hubris in the face of climate change today. It traces a shift away from sonderstellung, the concept that humans are placed above nature, to solastalgia, a recent term describing the reaction to the epic in nature coupled with a dread of losing it forever—a phenomenon that indicates a passivity and sentimentality we can scarcely afford in the Anthropocene. Ideas of what constitutes the sublime have fundamentally changed. Instead of being awed or afraid of it, humans have essentially become it through the damage inflicted on the natural world. The pertinent question is whether nature can survive us and our methods: industrial farming, vicious treatment of animals, indiscriminate polluting, destructive mining, and discreet colonial rapacity in the form of international corporations.
We must learn to follow Joseph Beuys’ philosophy that everyone is an artist and harness the power this identity bestows. With the environmental predicaments we face, especially in terms of regeneration, we need to ask what we can accomplish together.
An international reengagement with landscape has been evident for some time in contemporary art. In Winfred Rembert’s paintings and Ishmael Marika’s films, we see a forceful removal from, and involuntary attachment to land—for Rembert, in the context of the Jim Crow American South, and for Marika, a personal retelling of the Yirrkala land rights movement in 1960/70s Australia. The Chagos Research Initiative and Clement Siatous address the ongoing colonial/post-colonial fate of the Chagos Islands, while the Boyle Family utilizes a range of technologies to sculpturally map time-specific global geographies. Megs Morley and Tom Flanagan reflect on the legacy of European Romanticism, excavating the crisis of national identity in a post-colonial setting.
A range of environmental issues are explored by multiple artists in the exhibition. Richard Mosse examines the Amazon in his photographs of Rondonia, Brazil; Michele Horrigan takes a more politically blatant look at aluminum refinement on Aughinish Island in Ireland. Together, these artists document the shifting of nature and devastation of rural communities, Indigenous territories, and urban neighborhoods in the Anthropocene.
Through biting satirical paintings Sanam Khatibi exposes the worst traits of human character, which she contrasts in pastoral settings. Remorseless reshaping of ecosystems is evident in the works of Alexis Rockman, who highlights the plight of animals as a direct result of ongoing human encroachment. Yang Yongliang on the other hand attempts regeneration in his fantastical conflations of cities and landscapes depicting Shanghai and New York. The poetics of collaboration are elaborated on by Francis Alÿs, who, aided by five hundred volunteers, literally moved a mountain, both to criticize governmental inefficiency and give us hope for our fragile species’ ability to collaborate. In order to reintroduce wonder to audiences, Anya Gallaccio utilizes the senses, examining the natural entropy and the repetitious nature of life and death in her immersive works. Her fascination with these cycles was shared by Joseph Beuys, whose ideas of progress embraced environmentalism and employed activist strategies to guarantee a better and more inclusive future.
The artists in Romance, Regret and Regeneration in Landscape encompass a spectrum of aesthetic and political movements. They are visual poets who challenge dominant ideologies, question unregulated capitalism, and instill wonder at the sublime we need to actively save. Maybe we are—instead of artists, as Beuys suggested—in fact “curators” in the original sense of the word: caretakers and protectors. Perhaps a new definition of sonderstellung acknowledges that we are already in the heavens, that the role of curator, or conservator, of reality has fallen to us. It is our responsibility to curb our worst excesses, actively reengage with wonder as these artists have, and act to ensure we sustain it.
Image description: Almost the entire image consists of dark grey rocks piled in a quarry. There is a sliver of sky visible in the upper left corner, and it is a grey and cloudy day. In the bottom right corner, a nude man with fair skin and dark hair kneels on one of the rocks, extending his arms outward. He appears very small within the frame—could be missed upon first glance—in contrast to the vast quarry behind him.