Elizabeth Thun | Beyond Pine and Thistles

Elizabeth Thun's paintings unfold in the tension between nature and culture, vegetation and architecture. The depicted places and landscapes are both scenic and saturated with historic events and ideas, where nature is ready to take on man's static and temporary structures. Thun's paintings are often the results of research and field trips to the places she wants to portray. Her paintings are built up in layers, where different and sometimes conflicting expressions are allowed to coexist. The distinctive, detailed and ornamental are set against the fluid and amorphous.

In the exhibition "Beyond Pine and Thistles", Thun has been inspired by the Japanese 17th-century poet Matsuo Bashō, commonly known as the father of haiku poetry. Just like Bashō, whose poems were influenced by his endless journey through Japan, Thun finds inspiration by trekking and being close to nature. For this exhibition she planned a field trip to Bashō's Trail, a 125-mile-long hiking trail that begins in Tokyo and ends in Ogaki. Since the trip could not be carried out as planned, she decided to depict imaginary places along this ancient and mythical hiking trail.

In Thun's compositions, there is often a kinship with the bold and dramatic croppings of Japanese woodcuts, where different perspectives and states can cross paths and coexist. There are also references to the landscape painter Hokusai (1760-1849), as in the borrowed title "Fine Wind, Clear Weather" and the Mount Fuji-like guise floating over the checkered marble floors of the Versailles interior.

Thun always visits the places she wants to depict, where the physical encounter serves as the foundation for her own unique interpretations. She sketches to distance herself from the photographic vision, and with a clear ambition not to imitate reality, but rather to create an image that is important to her – the painted image.