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What if you long to be one with nature, but feel distanced from the landscape? Doris Kolpa (1996) explores this tension at Prospects in a series of three figurative paintings. The works depict nature that is both inviting and repelling: clouds pressing down on the horizon, mist concealing mountain ridges. Human figures appear in the landscapes, but they do not seem to belong there. In all three works, nature, art history, and an urban gaze collide. Kolpa examines how a landscape can speak of longing, vulnerability, and the question: what is our place in this?
Having grown up in the city, Kolpa sees nature as something distant. Her first stay in the mountains was an overwhelming encounter with unspoilt nature, and sparked a longing to return. It highlighted for her just how far removed the natural world is from a life that largely unfolds in digital and urban environments. Kolpa’s work emerges from the paradox between the desire to surrender to nature, and the realization that such surrender repeatedly fails.
Kolpa paints with transparent layers of oil paint (glazing). This technique creates space to search, to shift, and to reconsider the image. Her work explicitly references nineteenth-century Romanticism and the painters of that period, such as Caspar David Friedrich. Where those artists allowed the human figure to merge with the sublime power of nature, Kolpa instead reveals the inability to achieve such fusion. The work also resonates with the legacy of Expressionist Edvard Munch, alongside subtle references to contemporary visual culture, visible in elements such as clothing or accessories.
Written by Sarah van Binsbergen