The land around us is infused with stories - narratives both real and imagined that settle into the ground, becoming part of every footprint, every shadow and every horizon. Drawn from our Tall Tales collection, this curation considers landscape as more than a representation of the world around us. Here, the land becomes a stage for mythology and invention - a place where what we see and what we imagine are inextricably intertwined.

Rather than simply documenting place, artists often use landscape to transform the world around them into a vessel for memory and myth. In Brett Whiteley’s Back of the Asylum, the artist represents the grounds of the asylum at Saint-Rémy where Vincent van Gogh was once a patient. While Whiteley never encountered the landscape as van Gogh did, the work appears as an imaginative reconstruction, shaped by and fascination with the Dutch artist. The landscape becomes inseparable from the story it carries, its significance extending far beyond the physical place.

Brett Whiteley 'The Back of the Asylum, St Remy (Another Way of Looking at Vincent Van Gogh)'

In other works, the landscape becomes a stage - the scenery is set, the props are in place and the actors are poised just beyond the frame. This theatrical quality emerges in the works of Charles Blackman and Yosl Bergner, where figures and their narratives take precedence over the landscape itself. The world around them becomes a backdrop against which stories unfold, inviting us to imagine what has happened before and what might happen next.

Yosl Bergner 'The Wedding'

Charles Blackman 'Angels'

Sometimes, however, there is nothing more compelling than the familiar. Everyday life can be its own kind of tall tale: a fleeting encounter, an ordinary street, a solitary figure or a seemingly insignificant moment transformed through the artist’s eye. 

For many artists, landscapes give our imagination somewhere to go. Whether grounded in history, memory, mythology or the everyday, these works remind us that the world is never simply what we see.

Sidney Nolan ‘Landscape’