From the invention of landscape painting to environmental art

It is man too who has taught the horses to kiss as presidents.

                               Jean Arp

This gallery brings together a number of historical works that give a brief overview of some of the milestones in the continuously changing relationship between humans and nature through art, urban planning, and technology. The works here are organized mainly in chronological order and pinpoint some of the themes within the exhibition as a whole. This gallery performs the role of an engine room that supports life on the spaceship we imagine this section of the exhibition to inhabit, but it could also be seen as a partial archive for some of the histories we would bring with us should we ever leave this planet:  histories intrinsically linked to our human DNA that also serve as a cautious reminder to future generations

The story presented begins with a rare Flemish tapestry woven in wool and silk in the mid-sixteenth century by an unknown craftsman. It depicts nature beyond humankind’s control, untamed and dark, possibly reflecting Medieval society’s fear of the primal forces of nature, of chaos and ungodliness. Half a century later, the Dutch landscape genre emerged, represented here through the works of Salomon van Ruysdael and Karel Dujardin. It placed nature in the foreground, no longer relegated to being a backdrop to biblical stories. Around two hundred years later, science and technology was promoting ideas of evolution and metamorphosis, setting time and matter in motion with innovators such as Eadweard Muybridge. It also freed space for art to be more than a mere representation of reality and become an active arena where models of interaction between humankind and the material universe could be challenged (prints by Max Ernst). The first half of the twentieth century saw a conscious move away from the modernist passion for technocracy and a return to nature (Le Corbusier's plans for the city of Algiers), the "organic culture" movement within the Russian avant-garde (works by Mikhail Matyushin), and the emergence of land art in 1969, which made nature an artistic medium.

In the half-century that followed, art went through various stages in its relationship with ecology: from objectivization to seeing it as a holistic system (Hans Haacke's work in the Central Gallery) and from irony (Gnezdo group) to revealing the impact of military and political agendas on the landscape and the urban environment (Martha Rosler and Kim Abeles).