Silent meadows, glistening coastlines, crimson skies, and rolling hills: When we think of landscape painting, there are a few typical images that come to mind. Landscape, in the traditional sense, has tended to mean pastoral scenes, like those by John Constable, or the towering mountain ranges of Albert Bierstadt and the Hudson River School. For centuries, landscape artists have approached the natural world with reverence, aiming to perfect its idyllic forms. Yet, portraying today’s natural environment requires more nuance. In many parts of the world, landscapes themselves are becoming increasingly volatile due to the impact of climate change. And contemporary landscape artists are responding with visions of nature that take new, innovative approaches. Some take a dreamlike approach, turning the greenery in front of them into fantastical, surrealistic visions. Other landscape painters go even further, questioning the nature of the genre itself.
David Hockney once said, “Enjoyment of the landscape is a thrill.” Contemporary painters are taking that to heart. Whether through bold experiments with technicolor palettes and unusual materials, or by disrupting archival imagery with sociopolitical undertones, contemporary landscape painters are reshaping how we perceive and engage with the natural world.
Here, we highlight 10 contemporary artists whose practices are innovating landscape painting.
Shara Hughes
1981, Atlanta. Lives and works in New York.
Shara Hughes, ‘True colors’, 2023,
David Kordansky Gallery
Shara Hughes, ‘Tumble’, 2023, David Kordansky Gallery
Fiery sunsets, sinuous forests, and vibrant color fields define the landscapes of Atlanta-born, Brooklyn-based artist Shara Hughes. Hughes’s varied inspirations range from color field painters to Post-Impressionists. While her works are not painted en plein air, she takes a lenient approach to her brushwork. In Tumble (all works 2023), for example, which depicts a waterfall cascading down a mountain, the trees and green islands are rendered with long gestural brushstrokes.
The artist’s use of color lures viewers into her world, which encompasses natural scenes painted from memory rather than reference images. Her polychromatic palette transforms otherwise still scenes into landscapes bursting with life. In True Colors, for instance, a painting of a treeline refracted on the surface of a dark lagoon is saturated with bright, sinuous streaks of color.
Hughes is represented by Pilar Corrias Gallery in London, Galerie Eva Presenhuber in Zürich, and David Kordansky Gallery in Los Angeles.
Beau Carey
1980, Albuquerque. Lives and works in Albuquerque.
Beau Carey, ‘Fire Kasina’, 2023, Richard Levy Gallery
Beau Carey, ‘Gibarian’, 2022, Visions West Contemporary
Beau Carey is fearless. From painting on a 10-foot-wide raft in the middle of Lake Superior to capturing the Arctic’s raw beauty en plein air, this American landscape artist thrives in the most challenging environments. In his work, Carey uses these daring locations as the starting points for his intricately patterned compositions. In the blazing red landscape Fire Kasina (2023), he paints a mountain, then inverts and layers the same peak to create stratified patterns. These works are inspired by Kasina meditation practice, where a single image is the focal point.
In his oil paintings, Carey often combines several different horizons to create imaginary landscapes, as in Gibarian (2022), where multiple mountain ranges appear to be layered on top of each other. Elsewhere, Carey makes sure to include references to the sun, rendered as a muted, warm-toned circle peeking over these mountainscapes. In Duino Elegy (2023), for example, the sun appears repeatedly in different positions over the mountainous horizon.
Carey’s “Kasina” works were recently the subject of “Nameless Mountain,” a solo exhibition at Richard Levy Gallery in May 2024.
Paul Anthony Smith
1988, St. Ann’s Bay, Jamaica. Lives and works in New York.
Paul Anthony Smith, ‘Dreams deferred #33’, 2022,
Jack Shainman Gallery
Every night, Paul Anthony Smith sleeps with a brace on his right hand. It’s a precautionary measure against injury caused by the 36-year-old artist’s strenuous “picotage” process. This involves the artist puncturing the surface of an inkjet print with a potter’s needle, such as in the sunset Eye Fi Di Tropics (St. Thomas) (2023), where it adds a fence-like design on top of the original.
This innovative approach to landscape art extends to his “Dreams Deferred” series, where he layers oil stick paint on inkjet prints of his photographs. These impastoed paintings feature lush, flower-filled gardens, which are then obscured by chain link fences he spray-paints on afterward. Dreams Deferred #33 (2022), for example, severs the viewer from a bed of red roses, evoking a sense of isolation and control.
Smith is represented by Timothy Taylor in London and Jack Shainman Gallery in New York. He has also presented solo shows at Luis de Jesus Los Angeles and Green Gallery in Milwaukee.
Kylie Manning
1983, Juneau, Alaska. Lives and works in New York.
Kylie Manning, ‘See You on the Other Side’, 2020, New York Academy of Art Benefit Auction
The vast horizons of Alaska made a lasting impression on a young Kylie Manning. “A lot of people thought that it was a feminist decision to make large work, to flip masculinity on its head to make these masterpiece-scale paintings,” Manning once told Flaunt. “But that was never actually the agenda. It’s because I grew up in these massive landscapes, so it was just a very organic decision that sprung from growing up in Alaska.”
Likewise, the sun-soaked landscapes of Mexico, where Manning and her art-teacher parents spent extended periods of time, also influenced her work. This is evident in the sunny landscape rendered with a gradient of bright yellows in Three Augusts (2020). Her large-scale, gestural works evoke these distinct topographies and are often populated by hazy, figurative specters that blend into their disparate environments, as in Sea Change (Diptych) (2023).
Manning is represented by Pace Gallery, which hosted her solo exhibition “Sea Change” in Hong Kong in March 2024 after the show debuted at Beijing’s X Museum in February 2024.
Rush Baker IV
1987, Washington, D.C. Lives and works in Prince George’s County, Maryland.
Rush Baker IV, ‘Untitled’ (Gettysburg Landscape), 2024, Hemphill Artworks
Rush Baker IV, ‘What remains’, 2024, Hemphill Artworks
As the son of a Washington, D.C.–area politician and a delegate to the 2024 Democratic National Convention, Rush Baker IV wants his paintings to generate political discourse. In his exhibition at Hemphill Artworks in Washington, D.C., “Landscapes,” a selection of abstract works that use archival photographs and visual ephemera from the Civil War era comments on sociopolitical turmoil in the United States.
In this show, Baker takes the paper prints of historical landscapes and layers them with pigment, resin, and plaster. Untitled (Gettysburg Landscape) (2024) presents a portion of the Pennsylvania hillscapes where the Battle of Gettysburg took place, shrouded by encroaching charcoal-colored edges and frenetic splotches of yellow. Here, Baker expresses the historical significance of the battle while underscoring the dangers of society’s collective memory becoming obscured.
After graduating with a BFA from Cooper Union in 2009 and an MFA from Yale University in 2012, Baker began to think of his paintings as a way to generate discourse around policy. His work has been the subject of solo shows at Hemphill Artworks and Keijsers Koning in Dallas.
Michelle Jezierski
1981, Berlin. Lives and works in Berlin.
Michelle Jezierski, ‘Meld’, 2023, Galerie Wolfgang Jahn
Michelle Jezierski, ‘Haze’, 2022, Galerie Wolfgang Jahn
“A landscape doesn’t tell you how to read it. It’s what’s happening in you,” Michelle Jezierski told Berlin Art Link. For the Berlin-based artist, landscape painting is akin to abstract painting in that the viewer brings their predispositions to the work. So, rather than paint traditional landscapes, Jezierski instead splices together horizons and skyscapes to create segmented vistas, as evident in Haze (2022), where strips of two separate images contrast with one another. Elsewhere, she applies the same principle as tile blocks. In Bit (2023), one sunny vista is intermixed with tiles of a glowing sunset.
Educated at Berlin University of the Arts with sculptor Tony Cragg and at Cooper Union New York with painter Amy Sillman, Jezierski has presented her work across Germany at venues such as Schwartzsche Villa in Berlin and Kunst & Denker Contemporary in Düsseldorf. Her solo exhibition at Galerie Wolfgang Jahn, “Lapse,” featured works where glowing vistas are fragmented. For instance, Meld (2023), characterized by swaths of radiant orange, red, and purple, is split into two sections like a glitched digital image. These landscapes disrupt the idea of perfection and make viewers consider the ever-changing landscape instead.
Jeremy Shockley
1982, Travelers Rest, South Carolina. Lives and works in Los Angeles.
Jeremy Shockley, ‘Somewhere Over, Behind, and Beneath’, 2019, V1 Gallery
Jeremy Shockley moved to New York after finishing college at Winthrop University in South Carolina to pursue a job with his psychology degree. Instead, he found himself managing Tom Sachs’s studio, where he was pulled into the art world. Then, after 10 years, Shockley finally landed in Los Angeles, where he decided to devote himself to his painting career.
Shockley finds inspiration for playful landscapes from magical realism, “specifically adding magical elements into mundane situations in a matter-of-fact way,” he told VoyageLA. This is most evident in his signature smiling trompe l’oeil, seen in glowing horizon paintings such as Lil Sunburster (2023). Elsewhere, this puckish approach to landscape painting is evident in Somewhere Over, Behind, and Beneath (2019), where one stormy landscape is peeled back like a curtain to reveal a sun-drenched rainbow against a green landscape.
In March 2024, Shockley presented 10 works with Saint Laurent at Rive Droite Los Angeles alongside a collection of T-shirts, tote bags, and postcards. In recent years, Shockley has presented solo shows with Moosey, The Hole, and V1 Gallery.
Cobi Moules
1980, Oakdale, California. Lives and works in Philadelphia.
Cobi Moules, ‘Showering of Sparkly Bits (Mount Katahdin)’, 2023,
Fleisher/Ollman
Cobi Moules first learned to paint through the landscapes surrounding his rural hometown. For him, the idyllic American vistas had a negative cast, embedded with the conservative ideologies of his upbringing. Inspired by his experience as a transgender artist in rural America, he now reimagines the grand landscapes that inspired the 19th-century Hudson River School, adding flesh-like silicone to his canvases—either on the edge or on top of the painting—to physically and metaphorically integrate the queer body into his works.
The tactile, corporeal silicone is juxtaposed with the bright, sunny landscape paintings of the Grand Canyon and Mount Katahdin. In Showering Of Sparkling Bits (Jockstraps at Grand Canyon with Rainbow) (all works 2023), the silicone surrounds the paintings. In contrast, in Bigger, Faster, and Hungrier (Natural Bridge), the silicone almost wholly envelops the canvas, marked with blemishes and mole-like marks, as if transforming the landscape into a living entity.
These works were part of Moules’s most recent solo exhibition, “Showering of Sparkling Bits,” at Schlomer Haus Gallery in May 2024.
Emilio Perez
1972, New York. Lives and works in Brooklyn.
Emilio Perez, ‘Notes From the Mona Passage #1 Rincon, Puerto Rico’, 2023,
Kates-Ferri Projects
Emilio Perez, ‘Notes From the Mona Passage #2 Rincon, Puerto Rico’,
2023, Kates-Ferri Projects
Cuban American painter Emilio Perez treats his X-Acto knife like a paintbrush. In his work, he layers enamel and latex before carving through the still-pliable surface to create serpentine and jagged forms beneath, shaping his works in real time. These Abstract Expressionist works set the stage for his transition to landscape paintings following the COVID-19 pandemic, such as Notes From the Mona Passage #1 Rincon, Puerto Rico (2023), where the knotted, flowing forms and technicolor palette of his abstract work create paradisiacal landscapes.
Born in New York in 1972, Perez grew up influenced by the Cuba his parents left behind in 1961. In response, his work approaches Latin American landscapes with this idyllic lens. In the Garden Of What Was (2024), for instance, portrays an Edenic valley with soft pastels and fluid brushstrokes that convey the movement of wind through verdant foliage and cascading waters, creating a dreamlike atmosphere. These landscapes were most recently the subject of a solo exhibition, “The Invention of Nature,” at Bienvenu Steinberg & C in New York in 2024.
July Guzman
2001, Guadalajara, Mexico. Lives and works in southern California.
July Guzman, ‘Moonset’, 2024, 1969 Gallery
July Guzman, ‘The picnic’, 2023, 1969 Gallery
A recent graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design, 23-year-old painter July Guzman is interested in the extremes of landscape paintings. His work ranges from nearly photorealistic depictions of horizons, such as his sunset Chimes (all works 2024), to bold experiments with form and incandescent colors, as seen in his swirling oil painting Red Flood.
His willingness to subvert the expectations of a landscape painting is evident in works like Moonset. In that work, Guzman lathers the canvas with textured black paint punctuated by a luminescent dot of fiery orange that seems to glow from within. Meanwhile, he often finds a middle ground, as in Boat in a Bay, where a heliotropic sphere rests mysteriously on the ocean surface, adding a touch of the ethereal to the otherwise familiar scene. These works were featured in his New York debut, “Along the Line,” at 1969 Gallery in September 2024.
Written by Maxwell Rabb
Source: Artsy
