Sholto Blissett

Nature and its representation in the history of art are central to both the life and work of Sholto Blissett (b. 1996 in Salisbury, UK), who grew up in the Hampshire countryside and studied geography, before obtaining his MA in Painting from the Royal College of Art, London. His landscape paintings are comprised of mountains, bodies of water, and samples of neoclassical architecture, assembled into fantastic combinations reminiscent of Renaissance capriccios. Blissett uses these uninhabited vistas to investigate how human societies conceive and mythicize their place in the natural world. Through an observational practice and a multifarious brushwork, he critically draws on Romanticism and the Sublime, which have contributed to constructing a binary vision between nature and humankind. Standing in the center of the compositions, thus symbolizing the anthropocentrism and hubris Blissett exposes, temples, obelisks, pyramids and other triumphal arches are akin to tokens of fallen glory and foolish greed. Simultaneously meditative and eerie, Blissett’s landscapes indecisively oscillate between a hope for a restored quietude and the prospect of an ineluctable collapse.