Graeme Todd Space Is Deep

The Scottish artist Graeme Todd has been making a name for himself over the course of the last few years with his innovative and fresh treatment of one of the most traditional painting themes – the landscape. With Space is Deep the Glarus Art Museum is pleased to present Graeme Todd’s most significant solo exhibit thus far outside Great Britain.

For years the artist (b 1962 in Glasgow, lives and works in East Lothian) has been occupying himself with landscape, with space in the broadest sense of the word, despite the fact that his works have eluded being classified as pure landscape depictions. Stemming from oil painting, which in the early 90s was still clearly reminiscent of a certain Gustave Courbet’s landscape painting, Graeme Todd gradually acquired a more spontaneous, more fragmented approach in work done on layers of industrial varnish. In this fashion he developed an innovative imagery whose tension is generated by combining two-dimensional compositions with layers of linear and planar elements.
The figurative symbols in Todd’s works – a balancing act between abstraction and figuration – refer principally to landscape fragments with allusions to art history or tourism: Paintings and drawings from previous epochs, his own photographs and reminiscences, postcards and souvenirs with tourist motifs can supply the artist with pictorial sources. A particular role in Todd’s paintings is played by the art of the old German masters, the Romantic and the East Asian ink drawings. With brush and felt pen, much in the manner of a collage, he blends citations from art and everyday into a functional whole, fusing them in layers of varnish, the application of which to his pictures he compares to amber encasing a fly: In this manner landscape drawings reflecting the most diverse chronological history and preference of medium become preserved, thereby facilitating simultaneous consideration.
Although Todd’s pictures draw from the store of art history, their recognizable permutation as well as their disclosure of the construction process for creating spatial illusion firmly anchors them in the present. Notwithstanding the seductive materiality imparted by the surface of the image and the captivating plasticity of the pictures, the viewer is nevertheless denied a dreamy sense of absorption while contemplating the works: Abstract elements, such as vertical stripes overlying the pictorial motif, lavish ornamental loops and garlands, or an obsessive collection of dots having no immediate purpose in the composition of the landscape image fling the viewers back to themselves and compel them to actively respond. The works challenge the illusory spatial concepts, direct scrutiny to the surface of the picture, and reveal the discordance between the content (landscape) and the picture in its entirety.
The exhibit “Space is Deep” is comprised predominantly of Todd’s pictures created over the past two years. Specifically in preparation for the exhibit in Glarus, the artist also created an entirely new work series relevant to the topographical and historical data for the Glarus region, augmenting it with two large-scale works painted at the Art Museum itself.

Hans Conrad Escher von der Linth > Panoramas

As a typical representative of the Enlightenment at the close of the 18th century, Hans Conrad Escher von der Linth (1767 – 1823) was one of the very last universal scholars of Switzerland. He was a statesman, scientist and teacher, merchant and master of channel construction. He goes down in history as the initiator of the Linth water works. His talent for drawing and watercolors, however, remained unrecognized until the 1970s: Between 1780 and 1822 Escher documented his geological research of Switzerland with over 1000 mountain scenes without ever contemplating any artistic intentions. He was one of the first to portray the Alps in large-scale panoramas measuring up to four meters in width. In anticipation of the works catalogue containing Escher’s graphical conceptions scheduled to appear in the autumn of 2002, the Glarus Art Museum is showing a selection of Glarus area scenes and panoramas belonging to this long-disregarded segment of his life work.

Thunderstorm on the Alp. Graeme Todd’s favorite pictures from the Glarus Art Society collection

In cooperation with Graeme Todd, a selection of 19th century landscape paintings from the collection of the Glarus Art Society is being presented as an augmentation and art-historical bridge linking Escher’s early 19th century drawings and watercolors and Todd’s contemporary interpretations of space. This group of works representing three distinct epochs -- although parallel yet shown as autonomous exhibits and devoted both specifically and generally to the topic of landscape -- does particular justice to the contemporary painter’s approach: He himself often and readily avails himself of the store of art history.