The Saastamoinen Foundation’s Art Collection features a rich and diverse selection of contemporary artworks by both Finnish and international artists. It’s no coincidence that landscape and nature emerge prominently in 21st-century visual art. A landscape carries emotion and thought. Experiencing a landscape always involves the viewer’s presence, a personal perspective.

Waterfall Rainbow and Other Events in Nature (2013–2015) showcased landscape and nature themes in contemporary art, based on works from the foundation’s collection. The exhibition took its name from artist Kari Cavén’s kinetic sculpture Waterfall Rainbow and painter Reino Hietanen’s series Events in Nature. Among the works, Elina Brotherus’s contemplative video piece was one that museum visitors continued to request long after the exhibition ended.

Landscape art secured its place at the heart of visual art during the Romantic era in the 19th century. Contemporary landscapes may owe something to traditional ways of depicting nature and the environment, but at their core, they often offer entirely different perspectives. We may see, in a vigorous brushstroke—declared by the artist to be completely free of representational content—the lingering imprint of a visual landscape. Or nature may serve as the starting point for a chain of associations, ultimately resulting in an abstract pattern. Or the artwork might observe the flight of a bird, the gust of the wind, the sound of wilderness, the feeling of rain on skin.

Contemporary art might draw inspiration from the aesthetics of wastelands, the desolation of exploited frontiers, the anonymity of suburban neighborhoods, or the decay of slums. Our knowledge of the world and the universe has grown; we experience ourselves as part of cosmic infinity. We gaze at the stars or focus our eyes on a horizon that the painter presents in golden ratio, in autumn’s gray tones—or we see the horizon as a symbolic landscape.

For many contemporary artists, the landscape represents a state of change. That’s why so many contemporary landscape works incorporate time and movement, either as a mechanical element or as narrative expression, through video. Movement reflects the constant shifts and fluctuations of the global situation. At the same time, contemporary art itself is an expression that exists as contemporary only for the moment, eventually leaving the register of contemporary art to take its place within the continuum of art history.