The Shelley & Donald Rubin Foundation in New York is pleased to present Romance, Regret, and Regeneration in Landscape, a group exhibition exploring nature in contemporary artistic practices, ranging from the poetic to the political. Francis Alÿs, Joseph Beuys, Boyle Family, Chagos Research Initiative, Anya Gallaccio, Michele Horrigan, Sanam Khatibi, Ishmael Marika, Megs Morley and Tom Flanagan, Richard Mosse, Winfred Rembert, Alexis Rockman, Clement Siatous, and Yang Yongliang, engage with the environment through a range of aesthetic and theoretical approaches. The exhibition will run at The 8th Floor from September 18 to December 13, 2025.

Romance, Regret, and Regeneration in Landscape charts philosophical developments beginning with Edmund Burke’s theories of the sublime and beautiful, the European Romantic movement, postindustrial detachment from ecosystems, and finally, our hubris in the face of climate change today. It traces a shift away from Sonderstellung, the concept that humans are placed above nature, to solastalgia, a recent term describing the existential dread caused by dramatic environmental changes—a phenomenon that indicates a passivity and sentimentality we can scarcely afford in the Anthropocene. The pertinent question is whether nature can survive the damage we have inflicted upon it.

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