Forthcoming Altitude I
01.12.25 - 22.03.26 Private View Friday
Artists include: David Abbott, Sarah Grant, Tim Patrick, Jo Berry, Adam Rawlison, Lewis Graham, Claire Dorsett ‘When Altitude becomes form’ Altitude is an exhibition conceived as a multi-year, perhaps even decade-long, project, bringing together landscape paintings recorded with a title addition, according to their height above sea level. Each work registers a specific altitude, using metres as both a factual or estimated measurement and a conceptual anchor. Through this cumulative approach, Altitude proposes landscape not as a fixed genre, but as an ongoing act of observation shaped by geography, data, and lived experience.
The exhibition is informed by, and is a homage to, the work of Carol Rhodes (1959–2018), whose paintings depict landscapes from elevated, often aerial viewpoints. Rhodes’ work is characterised by a cool, analytical distance: industrial sites, quarries, road systems, and agricultural land are rendered with flattened perspective, sharp edges, and muted colour. Her landscapes appear simultaneously abstract and documentary, evoking Shan Shui (Chinese) and Sansuiga (Japanese) traditional landscapes, art forms featuring elevated, often "bird's-eye" viewpoints and flattened perspectives.. By removing the human figure and adopting a hovering vantage point, Rhodes transforms terrain into a system, measured, surveyed, and shaped by economic and infrastructural forces.
Altitude also draws on the legacy of the New Deal photographers and the later exhibition New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape (1975). Like these photographic traditions, the project adopts a restrained, descriptive approach to landscape, resisting romanticism in favour of clarity, repetition, and structure. Measurement, whether through altitude, framing, or seriality, becomes a way to acknowledge how contemporary landscapes are constructed, occupied, and continually redefined. In this sense, Altitude positions painting as a parallel form of topographic record: slow, deliberate, and attuned to the subtle shifts between place, representation, and time.
In this context, Altitude serves as a platform for artists selected for their ethical engagement with landscape, where political discourse is treated as inseparable from material-led practice. The series prioritises artists whose work acknowledges landscape as contested ground, shaped by histories of extraction, ownership, access, and labour, while remaining attentive to the physical acts of painting: surface, scale, pigment, and process. Selection is guided not by style but by commitment: to sustained looking, to the consequences of representation, and to the social and environmental conditions embedded within place. By holding political awareness alongside the slow, material logic of painting, Altitude resists both spectacle and nostalgia, instead presenting landscape as a site where aesthetic decisions are always entangled with ethical position.