The Matter of Awe: Landscapes in Art

Landscapes, as a genre, have never merely been about depicting what the eye sees when gazing at a rustic parcel of land. Far from serving as an objective record of the earth, the landscape has long offered artists a powerful means of expressing aesthetic, spiritual, emotional, and political dimensions. It is also a genre where artists demonstrate their technical prowess and experiment with form. Through landscapes, we glimpse an artist’s interior world and motivations, and, in turn, discover new ways of seeing our own.

This exhibition explores three essential facets of the genre: seascapes, terrestrial landscapes, and skyscapes. The seascape captures emotional extremes — from the serene coastlines of Armand Merizon, evoking passivity and calm, to the violent, crashing waves of Childe Hassam, conveying nature’s untamable force and our own vulnerability in its wake. Skyscapes, meanwhile, emerge from the impulse to gaze upward in wonder. Their abstract forms and fleeting light have long fascinated artists, including Chris Stoffel Overvoorde, Ben Whitehouse, and Stephen Hannock, who reveal the fleeting beauty of the sky.

Terrestrial landscapes — the largest focus of this exhibition — remain the most enduring and versatile mode through which artists have depicted the natural world. Nineteenth-century American painters such as George Inness, Frederick Ballard Williams, Thomas Hart Benton, and Asher B. Durand captured sweeping vistas and sublime horizons that echoed contemporary views of the North American landscape as vast and transcendent, aligning with the westward expansion of Euro-American settlers. European artists like H. Claude Pissarro, Edvard Munch, Henri Rousseau, Giovanni Giacometti, and Pablo Picasso approached the landscape as both subject and studio, where they refined their use of light, line, and expressive gesture. For these artists, the landscape was not only rich with meaning, but also a site of continual formal invention.

Featuring more than sixty paintings, this exhibition occupies GRAM’s entire first floor and will remain on view from November 22, 2025, through August 16, 2026. Drawn primarily from GRAM’s permanent collection, it is made possible through the generosity of several lenders, including a significant loan from Andrey and Anna Omeltchenko.

Wege Foundation

Allen and Nancy Vander Laan
James and Mary Nelson

Haworth Helps
Dirk and June Hoffius
Frank and Sharon Van Haven

Sam and Janene Cummings
Robert W. Daverman, AIA/​Grand Rapids Community Foundation
Meg Goebel
Herbert and Sharon Lantinga
Mark and Janet Nisbett
Jim and Marie Preston

Additional support provided by GRAM Exhibition Society

Daniel & Pamella DeVos Foundation