Goldin+Senneby After Landscape by Paulina Sokolow

Goldin+Senneby’s “readymades” of climate actions targeting iconic masterpieces take landscape painting to a new level.

On Tuesday, 15 November 2022, around lunchtime, two young individuals entered the Leopold Museum in Vienna. Once inside, they made their way to Gustav Klimt’s renowned 1908 painting Death and Life. Suddenly, the man threw a thick, black, oily liquid at the artwork. The substance created an amorphous blotch across the composition, covering the embracing couple and the skeleton, symbol of death. Security guards quickly intervened and restrained him as he proclaimed that the world as we know it no longer exists and that governments have long known the direction we’re heading without taking action. Meanwhile, the woman glued one of her palms to the protective glass. The attack was filmed and published online by the group that claimed responsibility: Letzte Generation Österreich.

After Death and Life is the latest work in the artist duo Goldin+Senneby’s series After Landscape, in which they closely examine the spate of art attacks that took place in European museums shortly after they reopened following the pandemic. Regardless of one’s opinion on the method of drawing attention to the escalating climate crisis by throwing liquids and substances at iconic masterpieces, these groups and individuals have succeeded in their aim. Considerable attention was also directed at the affected artworks, one of which is housed at the Nationalmuseum in Stockholm. All the targeted pieces depicted landscapes and nature. But how did the artworks themselves fare?

Surprisingly well, as it turned out, thanks to the so-called climate boxes in which particularly vulnerable paintings are placed in accordance with international museum standards. Conservators were able to remove the paintings unharmed and rehouse them in new protective cases.

Goldin+Senneby, however, are not primarily interested in the attacks themselves. Instead, their focus is on what happens when we turn our attention to the boxes that were splattered with mashed potato, ink, pea soup and red paint. Could these be viewed as a modern form of landscape painting?

In keeping with the duo’s established practice of enlisting the expertise of professionals from various fields, they commissioned a conservator to meticulously recreate the incidents. The resulting works, all except Death and Life, were exhibited in the critically acclaimed solo exhibition Flare-Up at Accelerator during the spring. The series is now being shown at CFHILL in Stockholm, before travelling to the MIT List Visual Arts Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts, later this autumn.

Goldin+Senneby, comprising Simon Goldin and Jakob Senneby, have worked together since their student days at the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm, beginning in 2004. Since then, they have explored the structural connections between conceptual art and the world of finance, including in the central work Banca Rotta and in a ghostwritten detective novel about an offshore company in the Bahamas (2007–2015). Among their most conceptual pieces are Zero Magic and a short-selling intervention involving the ticket-buying public at the group show Manipulate the World at Moderna Museet.

Their best-known work is, fittingly, one that has never been realised. Eternal Employment was a proposal submitted to the Public Art Agency Sweden that imagined a publicly funded job at a railway station, where the eternally employed individual would be paid from the stock market returns of the work’s endowment.

A realised work, however, is Time of the Spruce, inaugurated in August 2025 beside Skåne University Hospital. It consists of an incubator designed as a habitat for a clone of the world’s oldest spruce, Old Tjikko. Multiple Scars and Crying Pine are part of a years-long multidisciplinary project examining the conceptual frameworks of disease and pharmaceutical science, their commercial drivers, and how medical terminology has historically evolved from the language of warfare. This includes how such thinking has shaped the perception of the body as something that can be “invaded”, “defend itself”, or act “immune”.

After the Artist’s Garden in Giverny

After Grainstacks

After Sower at Sunset

After Vase with Fifteen Sunflowers

After Death and Life

Mixed media, various dimensions, 2025

Executed by: Fernando Cáceres