Beyond the Sea of Fog: When Landscapes are not Quite Views of Nature

A glacier rises like a sheet of glass. Pink clouds roll across the sky with theatrical intensity. In another work, a mountain nearly disappears into blackness, only revealing its ridges when the viewer moves.

At Sven Drühl's new Shanghai exhibition, landscapes are not quiet views of nature. They are polished, strange and slightly unsettling – too clean, too perfect, too beautiful to be entirely real.

Hyper Landscape: Beyond the Sea of Fog, now on view at Bluerider ART Shanghai, presents the German artist's recent works from 2023 to 2026, including silicone paintings, lacquer paintings and sculptures. Drühl, born in 1968, holds a doctorate in art history and has also studied mathematics, a background that gives his work its cool, precise structure.

"He is not imagining a utopian scene," said Elsa Wang, founder of Bluerider ART. "His landscapes grow out of art history."

That history begins with the great Romantic landscape tradition. The exhibition's subtitle, Beyond the Sea of Fog, refers to Caspar David Friedrich's famous image of a lone figure standing above a misty mountain landscape. In Friedrich's world, fog suggested the sublime, the divine and the smallness of human beings before nature.

Drühl asks what happens after that fog has lifted.

"When the Romantic fog has disappeared, what kind of landscape do we have now?" Wang said. "His answer is actually quite cold. We have more images."

Drühl does not paint from direct observation. He often starts from existing art-historical images, digital models and vector graphics, then rebuilds them with industrial materials such as silicone, lacquer and oil paint. The result is a landscape that sits between painting, screen image and manufactured object.

In the large work A.W.L. (2025), sharp mountain forms and icy cliffs are set beneath a dramatic pink sky. The surface is seductive, but also artificial. Silicone lines give the mountain a raised, almost sculptural edge, while the color adds a human warmth to an otherwise cold construction.

"The mountains are too clean, too perfect and too delicate," Wang noted. "They don't look real. But that is exactly the point. They are not nature itself. They are the way we extract, enlarge and reconstruct nature."

The black monochrome painting C.D.F. (Undead) offers a quieter but more haunting experience. At first, the canvas appears nearly opaque. Then, as the viewer shifts position, mountain ridges slowly emerge through changes in light and texture.

"The black works use the same black tone, but with glossy and matte surfaces," Wang observed. "When you move, you begin to see the rise and fall of the mountains."

Sculpture extends Drühl's thinking into physical space. Several works are based on processed geographical data of real mountains. In bronze pieces inspired by peaks such as the Himalayas and the Matterhorn, the forms appear damaged, eroded or broken, suggesting a future landscape altered by climate change and human force.

For all their beauty, Drühl's landscapes are not escapist. There are no travelers, no hikers, no heroic figures facing the mountain. Yet human presence is everywhere – in the data, the images, the materials and the damage.

"Ultimately, he wants us to think again about the relationship between human beings and nature," Wang said. "In the 19th century, Romanticism saw human beings as small before the greatness of nature. But today, are we really still that small? We now have the power to damage nature."

That question lingers after the viewer leaves. Drühl's mountains are beautiful, but their beauty is unstable. They show nature after art history, after digital images, after human intervention – a landscape beyond fog, and perhaps beyond innocence.

If you go:

Date: May 30 until July 26, 10am-7pm

Venue: Bluerider Art Shanghai

Address: 133 Sichuan Rd M. 四川中路133号

Admission: free