"We have lost all understanding of nature:" the fascination with wilderness in art

Nature returns in Mark Dion's installation in which a stuffed wolf stands on a hardware store trailer. Society, it seems, has incorporated the wild animal as a mere object. The US artist's display is a stark criticism of human civilization.

British artist Richard Long uses "raw materials and my human scale in the reality of landscapes." Stones and rocks he finds on his walks are favorite materials. The above color photo shows a natural rock formation in a desert in Egypt.

Pieter Hugo took the photo of the man and the monkey on a market in Asaba, Nigeria. What is the story behind the South African artist's seemingly everyday snapshot? Hugo presents Africa as a continent of extreme opposites, and many of his critical works of have become iconic.

This small sculpture displayed on a stand under glass could just as well be entitled: I used to be a computer. Swiss artist Charriere forms sculptures made from tiny bits of computer scraps and artificial lava. "We have lost all understanding of nature," says Charriere, who regards him self as a cultural archeologist.

In the early days of his career, Gerhard Richter was fascinated by motives in the wild. Empty, craggy mountain landscapes, the stark contrasts of light and shadow, interested the German painter. But he never went on a mountain expedition himself and instead used photographs as inspiration for his painted "Himalaya" works on canvas.

This large-scale photo of trees in a forest is a bit eerie. Danish-born Joachim Koester traveled across Europe for his forest motifs. In the border area between Poland and Belarus, he took pictures of Europe's oldest remaining original forest, which was also a bloody battle field in WWII.

Henri Rousseau presented his famous painting of a lion pouncing on an antelope at the prestigious Paris Salon d'Automne art exhibition in 1905, side by side with paintings by the controversial the Fauves group. Rousseau's painting was deemed unsophisticated, while the Fauvist artists, including Henri Matisse, rewrote art history with their works.

As the exhibition catalog states: "The utopia of a natural state remote from culture and human influ­ence seems anachro­nistic. And yet the exam­i­na­tion of tradi­tional images and fictions of wilder­ness seems more alive than ever before." "Wilderness" is on at Schirn Kunsthalle in Frankfurt until February 3, 2019. Author: Heike Mund/db