Radical Nature at the Barbican

Social Mirror, 1983. A mirror-covered sanitation truck by US artist Mierle Laderman Ukeles. Photograph: Mierle Laderman Ukeles/Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, New York

Agnes Deans: Wheatfield – A Confrontation, 1982. She planted and harvested two acres of wheat in Battery Park landfill, Manhattan. Photograph: Agnes Denes/Public Art Fund, New York

Island for Weeds, 2003, by British conceptual artist Simon Starling
Photograph: Jeremy Hardman Jones/Modern Institute/Toby Webster Ltd, Glasgow

Land artist Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty, 1970 (in the Great Salt Lake, Utah)
Photograph: Gianfranco Gorgoni/James Cohan Gallery, New York

Radical Nature is the first exhibition to bring together key figures across different generations who have created utopian works and inspiring solutions for our ever-changing planet. Radical Nature draws on ideas that have emerged out of Land Art, environmental activism, experimental architecture and utopianism. The exhibition is designed as one fantastical landscape, with each piece introducing into the gallery space a dramatic portion of nature. Work by pioneering figures such as the architectural collective Ant Farm and visionary architect Richard Buckminster Fuller, artists Joseph Beuys, Agnes Denes, Hans Haacke and Robert Smithson are shown alongside pieces by a younger generation of practitioners including Heather and Ivan Morison, R&Sie(n), Philippe Rahm architects and Simon Starling.

Christo & Jeanne-Claude - Revelation Through Concealment

Christo and Jeanne-Claude
Wrapped Trees, Fondation Beyeler and Berower Park,
Riehen, Switzerland 1997-98
Photo: Wolfgang Volz, ©Christo 1998

Christo and Jeanne-Claude
Wrapped Trees, Fondation Beyeler and Berower Park, Riehen, Switzerland 1997-98
Photo: Wolfgang Volz, ©Christo 1998

Statement:
The temporality of a work of art creates a feeling of fragility, vulnerability and an urgency to be seen, as well as a presence of the missing, because we know it will be gone tomorrow.

The quality of love and tenderness that human beings have towards what will not last - for instance the love and tenderness we have for childhood and our lives - is a quality we want to give to our work as an additional aesthetic quality.