In Dossena—home to the oldest mining complex in the Brembana Valley, where iron ore and fluorite were extracted for centuries—German artist Julius von Bismarck (Breisach am Rhein, 1983) will create his fifth landscape painting: a painting both of and within the landscape, in which the pictorial gesture dissolves the boundary between the subject depicted and the surface it is rendered on.
For this work, the artist draws inspiration from the aesthetics of engravings and mine studies that marked the work of many key figures in art history, from Albrecht Dürer to Caspar David Friedrich, and from Paul Cézanne to Paul Klee. In particular, von Bismarck references are eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Italian landscape views, woodcuts, and copper engravings—images that sought to portray the landscape as realistically as possible.
Adopting a diametrically opposite approach, the artist intervenes on the rock walls inside the mine, creating a “reversed” trompe-l’œil: rather than hinting at three-dimensionality through tricks of perspective, he paints lines and hatchings—reminiscent of traditional engraving techniques—that flatten the view of the quarry into a two-dimensional image.
In this way, von Bismarck does not merely represent the landscape, but physically enters it, confronting its scale in an act that becomes at once measurement, struggle, conquest, and transformation. The painted marking, applied directly to the rock, becomes a monumental gesture that—though impermanent—visibly inscribes itself onto the environment. As time goes by, the image will slowly dissolve through the action of atmospheric agents.
Through this process—whereby the mountain dissolves into black lines on a white background—the artist deconstructs the tradition of landscape painting, aiming to expose its contradictions and reveal how the representation of nature has always been filtered through idealizations and anthropocentric perspectives.
Ultimately, von Bismarck’s intervention seeks to reposition the human being within nature—not as something pre-human and “other,” but as a cultural construct that evolves through history.
