Inscape (visual art)

Inscape, in visual art, is a term especially associated with certain works of Chilean artist Roberto Matta, but it is also used in other senses within the visual arts. Though the term inscape has been applied to stylistically diverse artworks, it usually conveys some notion of representing the artist's psyche as a kind of interior landscape. The word inscape can therefore be read as a kind of portmanteau, combining interior (or inward) with landscape.

According to Professor Claude Cernuschi, writing in a catalogue for a Matta exhibition at Boston College (see external link below), Matta's use of the term inscape for a series of landscape-like abstract or surrealist paintings reflects "the psychoanalytic view of the mind as a three-dimensional space: the 'inscape'." The 'inscape' concept is particularly apt for Matta's works of the late 1930s. As Dawn Adès (p. 233) writes, "A series of brilliant oil paintings done during the years of his [Matta's] first association with the Surrealists explore visual metaphors for the mental landscape." And Valerie Fletcher, in Crosscurrents of Modernism (p. 241), writes that during this time Matta "created with startling mastery the paintings he called 'inscapes' or 'psychological morphologies.' " See also Miriam Basilio's essay, "Wifredo Lam's 'The Jungle' and Matta's 'Inscapes' ".

The term inscape was later taken up by the leading Australian surrealist James Gleeson, American abstract artists such as James Brooks, Jane Frank, and Mary Frank (no relation), and even a group of British fantasy artists founded by Brigid Marlin in 1961 and calling themselves the 'Inscape Group.' (The latter group may have had in mind another sense of the word 'inscape', associated with the British poet Gerard Manley Hopkins. See the article titled simply 'inscape' for more information on this.) More recently, in a 1998 review of a Mary Frank exhibition in New York City (cited below), Carol Diehl writes, "Titled 'Inscapes', the paintings are landscapes of the soul...."

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