The 2022 exhibition Infinite Beauty brought works from private collections in Hampshire into public view at The Arc in Winchester.
The exhibition examined the continuing importance of plants, animals, habitats and landscape within contemporary art.
Nature across several media
Photography, printmaking, ceramics and sculpture offered different ways of approaching the natural world. Some works began with familiar local experience, while others extended toward remote environments including Antarctica.
Artists represented included Andy Goldsworthy, Chris Drury, Elisabeth Frink, Ian Hamilton Finlay, Maggi Hambling, Richard Long, Juliette Losq, Darren Almond and Dan Holdsworth.
Their practices moved between direct engagement with landscape, symbolic treatment of natural forms and reflection on the environmental consequences of human activity.
Private works entering public circulation
Curator Steve Marshall assembled the exhibition through the cooperation of Hampshire-based collectors. Several works had rarely, or never, been shown publicly.
This gave the presentation value beyond its theme. Objects normally seen only within private homes became part of a shared exhibition and could be considered in relation to one another.
A programme of talks, wellbeing sessions, botanical art courses and curator-led tours accompanied the display. Suna Imre’s installation HEARTH was presented separately within The Arc during the same period.
Infinite Beauty avoided treating nature as a single stable image. Its varied media and artists revealed landscape as material, habitat, cultural idea and threatened environment.
The exhibition’s hopeful tone came from placing artistic invention beside ecological concern, suggesting that renewed attention to the natural world could begin with learning to see it differently.