Landscape Painting is a photographic and filmic series documenting Julius von Bismarck’s painterly interventions in various natural environments. With each action, von Bismarck engages the tradition of landscape painting by literally covering it in paint. He physically confronts nature's monumental dimensions to finally simplify the landscape's complexity through drastic (colour) reduction. His interventions took place in a Mexican desert and jungle (2015), a Russian forest (2016), a slum in Kibera, Nairobi (2019) and more recently in a quarry in Lanzarote, Spain (2021).




Landscape Painting (Mexico) (2015) shows painted segments of land in two different locations: a cacti- covered rockscape in the Mexican desert, and a jungle scene in Chiapas. Both interventions are documented with a thirty-minute video respectively. In each location, von Bismarck set up a team of locals, who helped him to cover the selected parcel in white acrylic and subsequently overpaint it in colours true to the landscape’s original shades – as a faithful recollection of how they remembered their land. In the jungle, local farmers painted various green tones onto the firstly in-white-covered environment, leaf by leaf, as recalled by memory. Similarly, in the desert, local agricultural workers repainted the rocky landscape, resulting in an accurate representation of the scenery’s original state. 





The Landscape Painting photographs are composed of multiple detail views, resulting in extremely high- resolution images. Upon closer examination, one can find the layer of acrylic paint that covers leaves, thorns, sand, and other aspects of the landscape.





Departing from the recurrent question throughout his work – “To what extent is human’s perspective of nature determined by how art presents it to us?” – von Bismarck’s Landscape Paintings challenge contemporary image production by conceptually exposing contradictions in human's perception of nature, but also our depiction of it, namely by deconstructing art historical themes and aesthetics through references to imitation, falsification and idealisation. Applying paint to landscapes is generally perceived as an attack on nature, yet with his actions von Bismarck invites reflection on a western view of human’s place in nature as well as on (post-) colonialism.