Julius von Bismarck Punishment #7, 2011

For his series Punishment (2011-2012), Julius von Bismarck traveled to the mountains of Switzerland, Brazil and the United States to battle against natural elements by whipping specific landscapes—a simultaneously enraged and meditative action which he captured in photographs and films. The settings in the Punishment series call to mind the landscape depictions of Romanticism: craggy mountains, deep gorges, the sea, and mountain lakes. These are large-format, classical motifs of nature, in which we see a young man energetically whipping a small piece of the majestic landscape to the point of physical exhaustion. The artist and his whip are dwarfed by the powerful background.