Paradise Lost

The exhibition Paradise Lost explores the way contemporary artists address a number of topical issues related to nature, the animal world and the major ecological changes that have affected the world in recent years.

Paradise Lost is centered on the idea that nature has been lost, has disappeared, and may be impossible to rediscover. Nature is defined as a reality that is shaped and transformed by culture and has not yet been replaced by an alternative. The relationship we establish with the animal world, increasingly important ecological transformations, descriptions of nature as a sanctuary, an apocalyptic view of the future and our economically motivated exploitation of nature and its consequences are some of the issues and approaches that artists from different generations and backgrounds use to present nature in this exhibition.

On the other hand, the show also includes works that speak of the unconscious as the source of the imagination and the driving force of psychological processes that fade away and vanish in the face of nature’s sublimity. It also includes works that re-describe nature as a sanctuary, a home. Even more importantly, it boasts artworks that investigate how human nature repeats many given conditions of nature and show that the relationship between nature, humankind, and culture is woven out of similarities.

At the same time, digital media and flowing images deliver nature to us as a landscape to behold. We’re looking at digital, re-produced images instead of at nature itself. When viewing certain apocalyptical images we are under the impression that we are witnessing not only the loss of nature, but also the colorful moments of a spectacle. At any rate, nature continues to surprise with each detail, while technology transforms it into a visual feast and re-creates it as an alternative world to behold. In a world that has lost its innocence, technology, as a new field of experience, is dominantly taking the place of nature.