Robilant+Voena is pleased to announce an exhibition of new works by digital artist Daniel Ambrosi relating to the landscapes of Capability Brown. Each piece offers a groundbreaking visionary interpretation of these quintessentially English, eighteenth-century vistas. This is Ambrosi's first solo exhibition in London, and marks the first time these historic landscapes have been the subject of an artworks series incorporating artificial intelligence.

Ambrosi has been practising digital art for over 40 years and is recognised as one of the founding members of the AI art movement. Since 2016, he has pioneered a technique of combining photography with artificial intelligence in the ongoing series Dreamscapes—large-scale landscape pieces that seek to translate the immersive experience of being in a particular place into art. The artist explains: 'Powerful landscape experiences are not only visual (seen) and visceral (felt), they are also cognitive; they make you think—about the nature of seeing, about the very essence of reality.'

This revelation is palpable in the resulting works—images that possess an astonishing level of detail and complexity to evoke the awe and sensory abundance felt in the presence of extraordinary landscapes. Realised for his exhibition at R+V as light boxes and front-lit prints, the experience they offer viewers defies categorisation: what look from afar to be vast photographic panoramas, on closer encounter reveal themselves to be composed of myriads of brushstroke-like marks that recall the works of Impressionism, while simultaneously creating a hyperreal vision.

For his exhibition at R+V, Ambrosi has turned his attention to perhaps the apogee of pastoral design—the magnificent eighteenth-century landscapes shaped by Capability Brown and his contemporaries in which an unforgettable 'sense of place' has been painstakingly created by man. Using photographic source material gathered from visits to ten properties across England—including Chatsworth, Blenheim Palace, Petworth and Stowe—Ambrosi has created twelve new works specifically for this exhibition, showing these timeless vistas portrayed through his contemporary visual language. The works are presented as aesthetic pairs, exhibiting the full visual repertoire of Ambrosi's Dreamscape series, with varying layers of digital crafting. The pieces vary in size, from 1.2m square-format works, to a monumental self-illuminating light box measuring almost 5 metres wide and over 2 metres high.

'The work of Capability Brown represents the power of ideas and artistic vision; his work demonstrates the ability of ideas to shape reality. I love how his visions were influenced by popular landscape paintings of his time, which Brown transmuted into real world landscapes that have been enjoyed by people to this very day. It's especially poetic to me how the collective vision of Brown and his artistic predecessors continues to reverberate centuries later when I undertook this project to capture these places photographically and turn them back into landscape paintings.'

— Daniel Ambrosi, 2023

R+V is pleased to be representing Daniel Ambrosi as our first natively digital artist, whose practice has a deep affinity with the gallery's dedication to the Old Masters. Our partnership with Ambrosi reflects our commitment to promoting contemporary artists who engage with the great traditions of art history, reimagining timeless themes and subjects for the twenty-first century.

As Carla Rapoport, founder of Lumen Art Projects, has noted, 'Daniel Ambrosi's deep-dive into the genre of landscape painting is both groundbreaking and mesmerising. He uses AI tools as old masters once used their paint brushes... his work inspires art lovers as well as other AI artists around the world'.

Press release courtesy Robilant+Voena.