Mapping Spaces

As a genre, landscape painting is indebted not to the painters who depicted nature in the most authentically realistic manner possible, and who thus established the genre, but far rather to the advances made in craftsmanship, engineering, ballistics and fortification – so runs the thesis of the exhibition curators.

With approximately 200 works of art all dating from the 17th  century – among other things, from the Prado, Louvre and Rijksmuseum – the ZKM | Karlsruhe presents both the most recent research findings on the subject and, consequently, a previously unknown aspect of painting.

“Mapping Spaces” is the first exhibition to have examined, on such a scale, the influence of early-modern guidebooks in geography, geodesy and the construction of fortifications on Dutch painting around 1650. The prelude to the project, developed at the University of Trier, comprises Pieter Snayer’s large-scale panoramic depictions of battles scenes in which maps and landscape paintings are superimposed in projected layers for the purposes of documenting the most recent achievements of modern engineering, ballistics and the construction of fortification.

Thus, the exhibition is unique in citing guidebooks in the subject of geodesy by way of explaining the emergence of this specific kind of landscape painting. As the exhibition shows, like modern satellite surveying (GPS) true-to-scale landscape pictures were indebted to a complex networking of knowledge: the alliance of geodesists, mathematicians, instrument- makers and painters. Therefore, artists had designed modern remote exploration systems long before the new media began drawing on digital images from space.

until July 13, 2014
Mapping Spaces.
Networks of Knowledge in 17th Century Landscape Painting
curated by Ulrike Gehring
ZKM | Museum of Contemporary Art
Lorenzstraße 19
Karlsruhe, Germany