This work is part of a series of large-scale installations conceived by Christo, often in collaboration with his wife Jeanne-Claude, starting in 1961. Here, a cotton canvas conceals a mysterious content while also covering a large floor area. Animated by folds and undulations, the fabric unfurls like a landscape. Very early on, the two artists became interested in creating monumental wrappings of iconic public buildings, a goal they achieved with the Aurelian Wall in Rome in 1974, the Pont-Neuf bridge in Paris in 1985, and the Reichstag in Berlin in 1995.

Pier and Ocean is one of the neon tube installations that characterize the work of François Morellet, a major figure in kinetic art and geometric abstraction. For this piece, first shown in 2014, he collaborated with Japanese artist Tadashi Kawamata, known for his ephemeral site-specific installations made from found pieces of wood. Morellet invited him to create a wooden bridge extending over the ocean, represented by thirty-eight blue neon tubes, gently flashing to evoke a luminous swell. A poetic tribute to a series of works from 1914 by Piet Mondrian bearing the same title, this immersive work retains the minimalism, as well as the systematic and objective language, of Mondrian’s approach.

In Automatic Landscape, Dutch conceptual artist Ger van Elk depicts a horizon line by leaving a blank space between two canvases, from which four streams of liquid paint flow. In this gap, numerous postcards accumulate, their presence—beyond the cliché of mass tourism they convey—highlighting the intrusion of photomechanical reproduction techniques into traditional art and the contemporary perceptions of landscapes.

In parallel with a series of vanities and portraits, the Madagascan-born painter Yves Oppenheim created a series of twenty-six landscapes starting in 1986. In Paysage n° 24, the background motifs appear to dissolve into broad strokes, contrasting with the earlier hyperrealistic variations of the series. Enlarged to a monumental scale, this Mediterranean landscape with Malagasy influences transforms into almost abstract pictorial spaces.

In contrast to his previous work, Martial Raysse turned to drawing from nature, landscapes, and the works of the old masters starting in 1973. Ceux du maquis [Those of the Maquis] is executed in tempera, a technique that preceded oil painting in the West in the 15th century. In this landscape, surrounded by the untouched white of the canvas, tiny figures are placed within a vast rural expanse. A discreet tribute to the French Resistance against the German occupier,this painting turns the landscape into a place of resurgence for the artist’s childhood memories.

Like a playwright, Valérie Favre often finds the motifs for her paintings in literature, which she then brings to life on the canvas. Domination is part of a trilogy inspired by fairy tales by the Brothers Grimm. In a ghostly forest landscape, whose background evokes the Romantic painting Die Toteninsel [The Isle of the Dead] by Arnold Böcklin, figures with uncertain identities seem to dissolve into the surface of the work through dripping paint. The depths of the canvas thus contain numerous enigmas and hidden paths.

Bang Hai Ja’s painting blends influences from her artistic training in Korea with Western gestural abstraction, which she discovered in Paris in 1961. By merging these two traditions, she developed a technique of absorbing pigmented, transparent washes on both the front and back of traditional hanji paper. Her works then incorporate layers and crumpling gestures on canvas, as seen in this landscape, designed as a “very low relief.” The artist thus transforms painting into a space of mediation between the Earth and the Sky, where light reveals itself.

The artist Su-Mei Tse, dressed in red, is filmed from behind playing the cello. A tiny figure in a vast, bright green meadow, she stands on the edge of a precipice, facing a steep mountain. At the heart of this romantic landscape, she performs one of her own compositions, slow and simple, its echo reverberating from the acoustic properties of the landscape.