Something quietly radical has happened to landscape painting. The contemporary landscape artists working today are not just depicting places – they are painting what it means to come from one, to leave one or to carry one inside you. From Hockney's hyper-saturated California to the meditative stillness of South Korean abstraction, this guide traces landscape art across cultures, geographies and generations – and makes the case for why it is the most emotionally compelling genre in collecting today
Artists have been turning to the landscape as a way of exploring the world around them for centuries. Mountains, rivers, forests and changing weather became subjects through which painters explored light, mood and emotion, from the Romantic movement through to Impressionism. Even at their most expressive, these landscape paintings remained closely connected to real places and direct observation.
Contemporary landscape artists approach place very differently. Many distort, fragment or reconstruct landscapes entirely, allowing memory, psychology and imagination to enter the scene alongside observation. From the saturated light of David Hockney’s paintings to the shimmering desert palettes of Touils and the dreamlike forests of Mulgil Kim, contemporary landscape painting now moves fluidly between reality and invention. Untethered from strict representation, these works offer collectors escapism and a more personal connection to place.
From Observation to Experience: The Evolution of Landscape Painting
Through much of Western art history, landscape art was expected to describe the world with accuracy, whether through pastoral scenes, Romantic vistas or direct observation from nature. Mountains, rivers and forests were treated as stable subjects, often connected to territory, national identity and humanity’s relationship with the natural world.
That began to change in the late 19th century when the Impressionists became increasingly absorbed with the fleeting, transient effects of natural light and weather, with artists such as Paul Cézanne disrupting traditional perspective altogether, breaking nature down into geometric forms and introducing multiple perspectives within a single scene.
By the early 20th century, the foundations of modern landscape art had already begun to emerge. As artists began moving away from strict observation towards more subjective interpretations of place, colour, perspective and painterly distortion became increasingly important tools for communicating mood and perception.
Throughout the 20th century, landscape painting became increasingly expressive and experimental. Artists pushed beyond realism, using colour and perspective to capture emotion and personal experience as much as physical place. By the time David Hockney began painting landscapes in the 1960s, the genre had already moved far beyond straightforward representation.
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David Hockney and the Reinvention of Modern Landscape Art (United Kingdom & California, USA)
Hockney later continued exploring perspective through photography and digital drawing. In works such as Merced River, Yosemite Valley (1983), a photographic collage breaks the landscape up into different viewpoints. More recent series, including The Arrival of Spring in Woldgate, East Yorkshire (2011) and A Year in Normandie (2020), returned repeatedly to familiar roads, trees and stretches of countryside as the landscape changed through the passing seasons.
Through decades of work, Hockney has continually challenged the idea that landscape should be experienced from one fixed position. His paintings, photographic collages and later digital artworks fragment perspective, stretch space and revisit the same places repeatedly under changing light and seasons .In doing so, he transformed modern landscape painting from a static image into something far more expansive and alive.
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COLLECTOR INSIGHT: FROM PLACE TO PERCEPTION – WHAT DEFINES CONTEMPORARY LANDSCAPE PAINTING?
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Beyond Hockney: A New Generation of Contemporary Landscape Artists
If Hockney helped loosen landscape painting from the constraints of fixed perspective, a younger generation of Contemporary artists has expanded the genre even further. Across vastly different geographies and visual languages, landscape is now used to explore memory, movement and personal experience as much as physical place.
From the meditative stillness of Korean painting to the heat-struck terrains of North Africa, the Contemporary and abstract landscape artists below encompass an extraordinary range of visual languages and cultural perspectives.
A World in Paint: 8 Contemporary Landscape Artists Reimagining Landscape Across Cultures
These modern landscape artists are pushing the genre into exciting new territory.
1. Mulgil Kim: Stillness and Inner Landscape (South Korea)
Mulgil Kim, Sea of Green (2025)
Mulgil Kim brings a gentle surrealism to landscape painting, transforming forests, skies and rolling fields into quiet spaces that invite contemplation rather than direct interpretation. Born in South Korea, Kim’s connection to the natural world deepened during her 673-day ‘Art Road’ journey across 46 countries, an experience that continues to surface in her luminous, contemplative paintings.
Recalling Korean artistic traditions that value stillness and sustained observation, her softly surreal landscapes carry a quiet sense of calm and reflection. Grasses ripple like waves in Sea of Green (2025), while works such as The Magical Tree Box (2026) introduce dreamlike elements into otherwise serene landscapes.
In Kim’s recent solo exhibition at Maddox Gallery, titled ‘Green Melody, Blue Poem’, landscape becomes a place of refuge. Closely aligned with the growing interest in nature in Contemporary art, known as biophilic art, Kim’s paintings offer something rare within Contemporary landscape painting: spaces that invite the viewer to slow down, look carefully and remain there for a while.
2. INAE: Stillness, Time and Minimal Landscape (South Korea)
INAE, Garden of Memories (2026)
Light gathers slowly in the paintings of South Korean artist INAE, whose layered surfaces are built from thousands of hand-painted dots and delicate markings. Positioned somewhere between minimalism and abstract landscape painting, her works allow reeds, flowers and distant horizons to gradually dissolve into radiant veils of pigment.
In The Afterheat of Memory (2026) and Garden of Memories (2026), forms hover at the edge of visibility, appearing only briefly before dissolving back into light and colour. Gold pigment glows softly across the surface, giving the paintings a warmth that shifts subtly depending on the viewer’s position and changing light conditions.
INAE’s recent Maddox Gallery exhibition, ‘Field of Memory’, brought together paintings from the ‘Memory and Reverence’ series, where light itself becomes central to the experience of landscape. Through slow, repeated gestures layered across the canvas, the works encourage a more meditative way of looking, allowing the viewer to become immersed in gradual shifts of texture, luminosity and depth.
3. Juan Cuéllar: Manufactured Visions of Place (Spain)
Juan Cuéllar, Smart Home (2026)
Empty highways, petrol stations and futuristic buildings populate the landscape paintings of Spanish artist Juan Cuéllar. Drawing on the visual language of mid-century America, his works combine suburban architecture and cinematic lighting within stylised vistas that are at once familiar and strangely artificial.
Empty roads cut through sleek mountains in Inheritance (2026) and Japón Futuro (2025), where glowing buildings, clipped greenery and hard-edged shadows create landscapes that are too perfect to be based in reality. American suburbia, advertising and retro-futurist design overlap throughout the paintings, giving them the uncanny polish of imagined worlds.
Beneath the calmness of these pristine environments is a clear sense of unease. With no people present in the frame, Cuéllar’s landscapes resemble idealised versions of modern life, where perfection begins to feel strangely hollow.
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4. Mina Alikhani: Landscape and Displacement (Iran)
Mina Alikhani, Sui Generis (2025)
Rounded trees, softened hills and carefully sculpted topiary populate the imagined landscapes of Iranian-American artist Mina Alikhani. Her paintings exist in worlds with no fixed geography, where pastel forests and exaggerated natural forms drift somewhere between memory, fantasy and emotional recollection.
In works such as Harvest Moon (2026) and Mid-century Woods (2026), clusters of rounded trees gather beneath flattened skies, while simplified organic forms create environments that are strangely ordered and self-contained. Moving between her Iranian and American cultural identities, Alikhani avoids tying her landscapes to any single place, allowing fragments of memory and displacement to shape the terrain instead.
That tension between comfort and distance lingers beneath the paintings’ playful surfaces. However idyllic the scenes first appear, there is always something slightly unreachable about them, as though the landscapes exist just beyond the edge of recognition.
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5. Will Martyr: Architectural Landscapes (United Kingdom)
Will Martyr, In The Embrace Of Exquisite Stillness (2024)
Sun-soaked terraces, still pools and Mediterranean coastlines recur throughout the paintings of British artist Will Martyr, whose saturated landscapes draw on the visual language of holidays, coastal living and escape. Though not based on specific locations, the scenes recall the warmth of places remembered long after summer has ended.
In Where We Are Ourselves (2026) and Goodbye Kisses (2026), empty chairs sit beside still pools, fading light casts shadows across terraces and windows frame distant coastlines. Martyr’s controlled perspective and heightened colour give the paintings a cinematic stillness, as though the viewer has arrived just after a gathering has dispersed.
Rather than focusing on figures, Martyr’s landscapes suggest human presence through architecture, objects and arrangement. Open windows, half-finished tables and carefully ordered interiors imply lives unfolding somewhere beyond the frame, giving the paintings a natural affinity with spaces associated with travel, retreat and coastal living.
6. Dairo Vargas: Emotional Terrain (Colombia/London)
Dairo Vargas, Passage of Time (2023)
Landscape appears in fragments in Dairo Vargas’ paintings, with collapsing gardens, overgrown ruins and flashes of saturated colour drifting between figuration and abstraction. Working with loose, gestural brushwork and densely layered paint, Vargas creates scenes that are constantly shifting, pulling historical landscape painting into something wilder and darker.
Turbulent passages of paint gather lush vegetation, crumbling ruins and fragments of a figure together in The Noble Folly (2026), with moments of beauty interrupted by signs of decay. Echoes of Romantic and pastoral painting are evident in Vargas’ painting style, yet they never tip into nostalgia. Volatile and unstable, it is as if the scene is actively breaking apart in front of the viewer’s eyes.
Colombian born and now based in London, Vargas approaches landscape through fragmentation rather than fixed geography. His paintings switch constantly between seduction and deterioration, allowing lush colour and painterly beauty to unravel into something rawer.
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7. Touils: Desert Landscapes and Cultural Memory (Morocco/Dubai)
Touils, The Silent Valley (2025)
Desert valleys, mosques and sunlit mountain ranges emerge through a multitude of layered brushstrokes across Touils’ landscapes, reflecting the architecture and cultural memory of the Arab world. Originally from Morocco and later based in France before relocating to Dubai, Touils uses painting to preserve places, traditions and architectural histories that are entwined with his identity.
In works such as Mosque of King Fahd Bin Abdulaziz Al-Saud (2025) and The Silent Valley (2025), his unique painting technique gives the works a woven, textile-like surface, while tones of ochre, violet, green and white capture the intensity of the desert heat in Dubai.
Although closely observed, Touils’ landscapes are never purely documentary. Reflecting broader questions surrounding cultural identity in art, his desert scenes are painted with the familiarity of places deeply tied to the artist’s own lived experience, allowing architecture and landscape to carry traces of personal history alongside wider Arabic traditions.
Cultural Identity in Art: Why Landscape Paintings Resonate with Collectors Today
The enduring appeal of Contemporary landscape painting lies partly in its emotional immediacy. Unlike figurative art, landscapes invite viewers to project themselves into the image, attaching their own memories and associations to the place. A coastline, mountain or field may belong to a specific geography, yet still feel strangely familiar to someone seeing it for the first time.
Landscape painting has also become increasingly important within Contemporary interiors, where large-scale works introduce atmosphere, colour and spatial openness into a room. The luminous stillness of INAE, the Mediterranean warmth of Will Martyr and the desert palettes of Touils each create entirely different experiences within a room.
Many Contemporary landscape artists are also using place to explore questions of identity, migration and cultural memory. The artists featured throughout this article draw on experiences spanning South Korea, Morocco, Colombia, Iran and Spain, revealing how landscape can carry traces of personal history, movement and belonging across borders. Far from simply depicting scenery, landscape painting has become an increasingly flexible way for artists to explore how people connect to place in a rapidly changing world.
Touils, Cherry Rain on the Fushimi River (2024)
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COLLECTOR INSIGHT: WHY LANDSCAPE ART WORKS SO POWERFULLY IN INTERIORS Through colour, light and spatial depth, landscapes can introduce calm, escapism, warmth or emotional intensity into the spaces people inhabit every day.
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Explore Works by Contemporary Landscape Artists at Maddox Gallery
Mina Alikhani, Pentatonic Forest (2025)
From the neosurrealist landscapes of Mulgil Kim to the emotional terrains of Dairo Vargas, Contemporary landscape painting continues to evolve through very different visual languages. At Maddox Gallery, collectors can discover a diverse selection of Contemporary landscape artists whose works reflect the increasingly personal ways artists are responding to place.
Whether seeking large-scale paintings for a coastal home, immersive works for a contemporary interior or investment-led acquisitions by internationally recognised artists, Maddox’s Art Advisory team works closely with collectors to identify pieces aligned with both personal taste and long-term collecting goals. With expertise spanning emerging Contemporary artists through to established blue-chip art names, the gallery offers tailored guidance across acquisition, collection building and investment strategy.
Explore the full Landscape Art Collection or speak with a Maddox Art Advisor to discover available works by the modern landscape artists featured in this article.
