LONDON.- Cristea Roberts Gallery presents A Threatened Landscape, a group show exploring the sublimity of nature and the forces of climate change, featuring Christiane Baumgartner, Miriam de Búrca, Richard Long, David Nash, Yinka Shonibare, Emma Stibbon and Joe Tilson.

The exhibition opens with large-scale woodcuts by Christiane Baumgartner (b. 1967) based on the artist’s own photography and film stills. The artist registers her own movement in industrial landscapes through one of oldest and most enduring methods of relief printing – woodcut.

In Windräder, 2003, wind turbines tower over trees; in Deep Water, 2013, a canal becomes slick with oil. The artist took pictures of an oil spill in Birmingham, which forms the basis of this work. These pictures appear as snapshots from the artist’s perspective, moving through a fast-paced world of pollution, but they are meticulously incised, offering a commentary on the passage of time.

Miriam de Búrca (b. 1972) creates striking glass works that depict trees in the aftermath of war, fire and drought. These golden works are made with verre églomisé, an ancient artform involving the gilding of gold leaf onto glass. The technique was once popular among the upper classes, who coveted gold artefacts. de Búrca replicates the technique to portray scenes of ecological upheaval in gold-leaf, directly referencing the extractive systems that have caused the climate crisis by seeking profit to the detriment of man and nature alike.

Screenprints by Richard Long (b. 1945) will also be on show. Ebb and Flow and Half Tide, 2018, depict rivulets of muddy water based on the riverbanks of Avon in Bristol, the city in which the artist was born and continues to live. Each print is deeply textural, evocative of the Earth’s surface and the seasonal changes that shape Long’s practice.

Ash Dome – Four Seasons, 2022 is a pastel edition by David Nash (b. 1945) that pays homage to a piece of land-art the artist conceived in 1977 by growing a circle of twenty-two ash trees into a vortex-like shape. Over forty years later, despite the fact that he thought this body of work would outlive him, Nash’s conceptual piece succumbed to ash dieback, a disease which is often fatal for trees. In response, the artist began to make drawings and prints that documented this loss. The artist comments: “It’s a work depending on natural forces, so ash dieback is a natural force. I have to accept that as part of the original concept… I’ve been drawing it and I will continue to draw it in its dying years.”

In recent years, Yinka Shonibare (b. 1962) has increasingly turned his attention to ecological concerns, depicting endangered and near-extinct species of flora and fauna native to Africa. A new series of prints, African Flower Magic, 2025, incorporate African ritual objects such as masks, alongside species such as hibiscus and aloe, in order to acknowledge the historic traditions of indigenous groups as custodians of the land. This body of work complements Shonibare’s Guest Artist Space (G.A.S) Foundation, which recently expanded its artist residency programme to a farm in Ijebu in Ogun State, Nigeria, to focus on agronomy, agroecology, and sustainability.

Intaglio prints and drawings by Emma Stibbon (b. 1962) of forest fires and erupting volcanoes will also be on show. Stibbon works on the frontlines of climate change, documenting extreme and volatile environments that are threatened by erosion and irreversible transformation.

In 2016, Stibbon was Artist in Residence at Hawai‘i Volcanoes National Park. In Steam, Pu’u ‘O’o, 2016, the artist, who often includes found pigment and objects in her work, uses volcanic ash in her drawing, imparting the physical experience of the landscape to the viewer to represent what we stand to lose.

The exhibition will close with etchings and aquatints by Joe Tilson (1928 – 2023). The prescience of the artist is demonstrated by his rejection of consumerism and Pop art in 1970, and his shift toward the mythology and symbolism surrounding nature. In the etching Proscinèmi, for Dionysos, 1982, the artist’s geometric grid arrangements reflect the cycles of life, directly referencing the God of fertility, Dionysus.

While Tilson’s work may seem contemporary to some, for the artist, these expressions of Grecian-Roman mythology represent conti- nuity and the age-old tenets of humanity and nature – our fates are inevitably connected to the Earth and the threatened landscapes that surround us.