10 Landscape Painters Today You Need To Know

Landscape painting is often regarded as a genre of the past, associated with historical traditions and the work of long-gone masters. It is sometimes dismissed as obsolete, overshadowed by more contemporary approaches to art that focus on abstraction, conceptual ideas, and the digital; however, exactly those principles seem to be revitalizing the genre today. Nature and the changing environments we inhabit continue to inspire artists across the globe, as we’ll illustrate by discussing ten artists leading landscape painting today.

Presented in alphabetical order, this list is not intended as a ranking but as a curated selection of the most important artists, both established and emerging, within the genre. Artists who have been relevant in the recent past and are therefore included in almost any listicle—such as Gerhard Richter (b. 1932), David Hockney (b. 1937), Wayne Thiebaud (1920-2021), or Etel Adnan (1925-2021)—but who are no longer creating or leading landscape painting today have been excluded, making way for new names who are redefining the landscape in 21st-century art.

1. Peter Doig

Peter Doig, born in 1959 in Edinburgh, Scotland, is without a single doubt one of the most established painters on our list—and is rightfully on everyone’s list when it comes to landscape painting. His early life was marked by frequent relocations due to his father’s work as a shipping merchant. Doig’s family moved to Trinidad in 1960 and later relocated to Canada in 1966, where they continued to move frequently. This itinerant lifestyle, with summers spent in Scotland, shaped Doig’s sense of place, something he often reflects on in his work. In the early 1990s, Doig began exploring an autobiographical approach to landscape painting, drawing on his experiences from his transient childhood. His work during this period includes scenes of snowy landscapes and canoes inspired by the long Canadian winters of his youth.

These evocative paintings are often imbued with a sense of mystery and magical realism. Doig’s adult life has continued to reflect the peripatetic nature of his youth. After establishing his career in London, he returned to Trinidad in 2002 for an artist residency, where the vibrant landscapes of the island began to influence his work. His Trinidadian paintings are rich in color and often feature architectural motifs. Doig’s work masterfully captures the subliminal beauty of nature while simultaneously evoking feelings of displacement and nostalgia. He combines personal memory with references to art history, film, and architecture to create landscapes that feel both universal and unfamiliar.¹

2. Daniel Heidkamp

Born in 1980 in Massachusetts, Daniel Heidkamp is a contemporary painter residing and working in New York. Heidkamp’s work primarily focuses on capturing fleeting moments within landscapes, interiors, and urban environments. His paintings explore the subjective nature of memory, aiming to find the ethereal within the every day and the mundane. His creative process is grounded in direct observation, with much of his subject matter originating from on-the-spot reflections of his surroundings. As a result, Heidkamp is known for his extensive travels, drawing inspiration from locations rich in artistic history. His journeys have taken him to places such as the south of France and Hudson, New York, where he seeks out locales that have long been centers of artistic production.

Often working from plein-air studies of these historic sites, Heidkamp reinterprets the landscapes in his studio, creating vibrant depictions that merge light, color, and atmosphere across multiple time periods. Heidkamp’s work has been showcased in numerous solo exhibitions, including Amphora at Pace Prints, New York (2020); Elevated States at Half Gallery, New York (2019); and Wavelength at Loyal Gallery, Stockholm (2019). His work has also been featured in group exhibitions, such as Here and There at Half Gallery, California (2021), and Sympathetic Magic at Blum and Poe, California (2020). Heidkamp holds a Bachelor of Arts in English Literature from Tufts University and a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Painting from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Massachusetts (2003).²

3. Shara Hughes

Shara Hughes, born in 1981 in Atlanta, working and residing in Brooklyn, New York, is an American artist known for her dynamic paintings defying existing conventions of landscape painting. Using bold brushwork, vivid colors, and shifting perspectives, Hughes creates works that blend abstract and representational elements in unexpected harmony. Her paintings frequently feature natural motifs such as snake-like trees, floating moons, distorted reflections, and textured night skies alongside abstract forms. These elements coexist in compositions that reflect the psychological complexity of her inner world rather than relying on external references. By mixing pigment directly on the canvas, Hughes develops unique, intuitive color palettes that echo art historical movements like color field painting and Post-Impressionism. Her work often presents evolving visions of flora and fauna, capturing nature in a state of constant transformation.

Hughes has had solo exhibitions at prestigious institutions, including the Kunsten Museum of Modern Art in Denmark (2023), the FLAG Art Foundation in New York (2022), the Kunstmuseum Luzern in Switzerland (2022), and the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis (2021). She has also participated in major group exhibitions, such as the ongoing Open Ended: SFMOMA’s Collection, 1900 to Now at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Whitney Biennial 2017 at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Her work is held in prominent museum collections, including those of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.³

4. Anselm Kiefer

Anselm Kiefer, born in 1945 in Donaueschingen, Germany, residing and working in France, is another highly established artist whose work engages deeply with themes of cultural memory, identity, and history. His landscape paintings reflect his preoccupation with the passage of time and the weight of historical memory. Kiefer draws inspiration from a wide array of historical, mythological, and literary sources, such as Germanic and Greek mythology, Christian symbolism, and poetry. These references are often woven into his densely layered compositions, which evoke a sense of accumulated history. Kiefer’s landscapes are known for their tactile, almost geological textures, achieved through the use of unconventional materials such as lead, concrete, dirt, glass, and found objects.

The sedimentary feel of his works conveys the layering of history, with weathered surfaces that seem to bear the scars of time. Many of his landscape paintings are intentionally exposed to natural elements like rain, wind, and heat, allowing them to weather and evolve over time, reflecting the processes of decay and transformation that are central to his practice. Kiefer’s extensive body of work has been exhibited in major solo exhibitions around the world, including at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Guggenheim Bilbao, and the Royal Academy of Arts in London. He has been the recipient of numerous awards, including the Praemium Imperiale Award and the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade.⁴

5. Friedrich Kunath

Friedrich Kunath, born in 1974 in Chemnitz, Germany, residing and working in Los Angeles, explores themes of love, loss, optimism, and melancholy in his often-dazzling landscapes, marked by paradox and irony. His landscape paintings are marked by their use of surreal juxtapositions, blending references from art history, German philosophy, and pop culture. Kunath’s move from the now-defunct Karl-Marx-Stadt (formerly East Germany) to Los Angeles in 2007 introduced a new dimension to his work, merging the introspective qualities of his European upbringing with the vibrant, often illusory world of Hollywood and American culture.

Kunath’s landscapes frequently reflect the dichotomies that shape human experience, such as the contrast between reality and fantasy, or the tension between humor and melancholy. His paintings depict dreamlike environments where the familiar meets the fantastical, drawing from pop cultural imagery to create scenes that evoke a sense of unfulfilled dreams and fleeting escapism. Kunath’s work has been exhibited extensively and is held in major public and private collections, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Centre Pompidou in Paris, and the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh. His practice continues to explore the complexities of human emotion through a unique blend of poetic melancholy and cultural commentary.⁵

6. Nicolas Party

Nicolas Party, born in 1980 in Lausanne, Switzerland, residing and working in New York, is a contemporary artist renowned for his stylized, vibrant, color-saturated landscapes, portraits, and still lifes. While he works across a range of media, including sculpture, pastels, prints, and installations, his landscape paintings stand out for their bold use of color and meticulous composition. Rather than creating realistic depictions of nature, Party reinterprets and transforms familiar subjects, using them as vehicles to explore the art of painting itself.

Party’s landscape paintings often strip away extraneous detail, reducing nature to its essential forms and lines, allowing the viewer to engage with the deeper aesthetic and conceptual aspects of his work. His precise technique and keen sense of composition echo a long-standing art historical dialogue between observation and imagination. Through his landscapes, Party invites viewers to see the natural world through a lens of abstraction and transformation, where color and form take precedence over realistic representation. His works have been exhibited internationally, with recent solo exhibitions at The Warehouse in Dallas, The Frick Collection in New York, and the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts.⁶

7. Stefan Peters

Stefan Peters, born in 1978 in Belgium, residing and working in Hasselt, is a Belgian artist known for his exploration of the mechanics of representation through landscape painting. His work often merges dreamlike and apocalyptic elements, using techniques such as mirror imaging, reversals, and cutting to disrupt the traditional elegance of his brushwork. In his recent works, Peters blends reality with dreamscapes, creating compositions where the two coexist. His paintings focus not only on depicting landscapes but also on examining the process of image formation itself. He juxtaposes the controlled nature and flatness of his smooth gradients on carefully finished panels with the virtuoso transparent brushstrokes in the tradition of Renaissance and baroque Old Masters—the so-called Sprezzatura; calculated nonchalance, depicting a scene seemingly effortlessly due to spontaneous and accurate brushwork.

An uncanny tension emerges due to ever-diminishing brushwork, large in the foreground and disappearing higher up the picture plane, the historical tradition of depth using aerial perspective obtained by color, and the sheer rejection of that depth due to the utter flatness of his gradients, confusing our perception and iconoclastically disrupting our historical conventions of observing and depicting. Often, the Belgian artist emphasizes this discrepancy in depth through the manner of diptychs, accompanying his Sprezzatura landscape with an untouched gradient—an open window next to a closed one. He is interested in how the imitative qualities of painting can evoke reality, often using fragmented imagery, alienating effects, or even the deliberate futility of a brushstroke to achieve this.⁷

8. Lou Ros

Lou Ros, born in 1984 in Pithiviers, France, residing and working in Paris, is a contemporary painter who explores landscapes and birds through his distinctive use of hybrid painting techniques, incorporating acrylic, spray paint, and pastel. His large and medium format works delve into themes that, while focused on nature, reflect aspects of contemporary life that are often difficult to define. Despite the absence of human figures or constructed elements in his landscapes, a sense of memory and reflection remains central to his work.

Ros’s landscapes are not aimed at naturalistic representation; rather, they convey a personal vision that engages with space and time in a contemplative and sensory manner. Through his painting, he captures moments and sensations that are not immediately visible, allowing viewers to experience a deeper, more introspective connection to the environments he portrays. His approach positions painting as both a meditative and critical practice, where the act of seeing becomes a layered experience.⁸

9. Ben Sledsens

Ben Sledsens, born in 1991 in Antwerp, Belgium, where the artist continues to work and reside, is a contemporary painter known for his naive landscape paintings, characterized by their vibrant exploration of light, color, and form. Sledsens draws inspiration from his surroundings, capturing everything from expansive natural landscapes to intimate interior scenes. In his work, there is no hierarchy of subject matter—anything that catches his attention is a potential source for his art. However, rather than representing reality directly, Sledsens reinterprets the world around him, seeking the utopian within the mundane and revealing the beauty in everyday experiences.

Sledsens abstracts his observations to their essence, aiming to evoke a total sensory experience of light and color. His paintings challenge conventional perceptions of reality, prompting viewers to reflect on their own ways of seeing and understanding the world. His creative process is thoughtful and deliberate, with a focus on form, line, composition, and color. His search for essence and beauty always remains anchored in recognizable forms, inviting viewers to appreciate the familiar and find beauty in the ordinary. Sledsens’ work is included in several international collections, including the Centraal Museum in Utrecht, the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, and the Hermitage in St. Petersburg.⁹

10. Emma Webster

Emma Webster, born in 1989 in Encinitas, California, residing and working in Los Angeles, is an American-British artist known for her landscape paintings that transport viewers into surreal, otherworldly realms. Her works blend spatial expectations with imaginative fantasy, creating environments that feel both convincing and hallucinatory. Webster’s unique process involves constructing scenes in virtual reality, which she enhances with theatrical lighting to craft natural vistas filled with drama, distortion, and a deliberate sense of artifice. By working from within her VR models, Webster challenges the notion of viewing from the “outside,” reflecting how we navigate the world with no true external perspective.

A graduate of Stanford University (BA, 2011) and Yale University (MFA, 2018), Webster engages with the evolving relationship between landscape and technology. In 2021, she published Lonescape: Green, Painting, & Mourning Reality, a collection of essays exploring the implications of image-making in an increasingly digital age. Webster’s work merges traditional landscape painting with contemporary digital tools, offering a fresh perspective on how we experience and interpret the natural world.¹⁰

Notes:

1. Acquavella Galleries, Peter Doig at https://www.acquavellagalleries.com/artists/peter-doig consulted October 8, 2024. ↩︎
2. Acquavella Galleries, Daniel Heidkamp: Tempo at https://www.acquavellagalleries.com/exhibitions/daniel-heidkamp1 consulted October 8, 2024. Volery Gallery, Daniel Heidkamp at https://www.volerygallery.com/daniel-heidkamp consulted October 8, 2024. ↩︎
3. David Kordansky Gallery, Shara Hughes at https://www.davidkordanskygallery.com/artist/shara-hughes consulted October 8, 2024. ↩︎
4. Thaddaeus Ropac, Anselm Kiefer at https://ropac.net/artists/51-anselm-kiefer/ consulted October 8, 2024. ↩︎
5. Tim Van Laere Gallery, Frederich Kunath: New Ballads at https://www.timvanlaeregallery.com/fk-exh2021 consulted October 8, 2024. ↩︎
6. Xavier Hufkens, Nicolas Party at https://www.xavierhufkens.com/artists/nicolas-party consulted October 8, 2024. ↩︎
7. Galerie Zwar Huis, Stefan Peters at https://galeriezwarthuis.be/en/artists/stefan-peters consulted October 8, 2024. ↩︎
8. Romero Paprocki, Lou Ros at https://www.romeropaprocki.com/lou-ros consulted October 9, 2024. ↩︎
9. Tim Van Laere Gallery, Ben Sledsens: Between Fish and Stars at https://www.timvanlaeregallery.com/bs-exh2024 consulted October 9, 2024. ↩︎
10. Perrotin, Emma Webster at consulted October 9, 2024. ↩︎

Last Updated on December 5, 2024