Julius von Bismarck: Landscape Painting (Mine), 2025
In the depths of one of the oldest mines in Italy’s Brembana Valley—once rich in iron and fluorite—German artist Julius von Bismarck has created a striking new site-specific work titled Landscape Painting (Mine) (2025). The project transforms the subterranean architecture of the disused mine into a vast, hand-drawn graphic landscape.
Carefully applied strokes and lines across the jagged rock walls flatten the three-dimensional contours of the tunnel into a two-dimensional image. This graphic intervention echoes the aesthetic of 18th- and 19th-century Italian engravings and Romantic-era landscape studies, drawing a direct visual connection to classical traditions of topographical representation.
Yet von Bismarck’s work is not a passive depiction of nature. Rather, it repositions the landscape itself as a medium of inscription—something to write with, not simply to look at. The mine, once a site of extraction and human labour, becomes both canvas and archive. The result is a work that sits at the intersection of ephemeral performance, spatial drawing, and historical reference.
Landscape Painting (Mine) captures a moment of poetic intervention, turning a forgotten industrial void into a resonant visual text—both documentation and autonomous artwork, suspended between presence and disappearance.
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