Infinity on the Horizon

Speaking about the landscape of the American Southwest, Georgia O’Keeffe once remarked, “The unexplainable thing in nature that makes me feel the world is big far beyond my understanding – to understand maybe by trying to put it into form. To find the feeling of infinity on the horizon line or just over the next hill.” This exhibition, inspired by O’Keeffe’s phrase, highlights modern and contemporary objects in the Georgia Museum of Art’s permanent collection by prominent and lesser-known artists. The notion of “Infinity on the Horizon” sparks a dialogue about the use of abstraction to expand our understandings of the landscapes around us. In traditional depictions of a landscape, the motif of a horizontal line demarcates the separation of land, water and the sky — in other words, the separation of the land beneath us and the expansive “other.” By examining the infinite approaches of abstraction, this exhibition begs the question: how far can the artist abstract nature before we lose sight of the horizon?

Examining this intersection of abstraction and landscape, artists with work in the exhibition build on histories of landscape painting from the late 1960s to the present. Featured artists like O’Keeffe, Elaine de Kooning and Richard Mayhew foreground modernist and abstract expressionist approaches to the natural environment through vibrant colors and manipulated planes of space. Meanwhile, contemporary artists such as Jennifer Sirey and Matthew Brandt use new mediums and techniques to challenge artistic traditions and renderings of the landscape. Moving across various themes, the exhibition highlights how artists extrapolate identifiable elements and visual markers of landscapes to comment on political, social and ecological issues happening within and to the environments around us.