Gwen Van Embden’s exhibition, “Mountain+Water,” builds on a previous body of work under this title, further exploring her enduring fascination with the essence of the landscape. It is not only its art historical significance that drives this interest, but its significance in the context of South Africa's political history. Her practice, rooted in an intuitive approach and shaped by a deep engagement with the medium of black ink, drawing inspiration from Chinese Shan Shui painting. In her work, the landscape becomes both a space of retreat and a site of recognition—a stage on which inner turmoil and external realities are equally present. Van Embden’s chosen medium—black ink —anchors her affiliation with Asian artistic methods, particularly the ancient Chinese tradition of landscape painting. The title “Mountain + Water” refers directly to Shan Shui, where the contrast between mountain (the immutable) and water (the fluid) serves as both a visual metaphor and philosophical inquiry. In her paintings, Van Embden invokes these dualities, echoing the centuries-old Chinese practice where each brushstroke carries the weight of history, yet is utterly rooted in the present moment of making. This exhibition is unified by a series of horizon paintings, works that exemplify Van Embden’s pursuit of purity in both process and subject. The horizon, for her, is not an imagined fiction or idealized scene but the distilled recollection of many landscapes—an unadulterated subject. Through the horizon, Van Embden charts her fluctuating psychic, spiritual, and physical energy, allowing each work to function as a visual record of presence and the prevailing equilibrium. There is a tension between abstraction and figuration, more marked in some works where the suggestion of form is subtle. The relationship between the natural and built environments suggested through ambiguous silhouettes adds another layer of intrigue. Yet, ultimately, purity and distillation are central to her practice. Not only does she distil the core formal elements that delineate a landscape through a constrained though intuitive process but in so doing she remains faithful to her medium, the ink and the Lithuanian linen canvas. This raw unbleached canvas imparts a textural quality, which echoes the natural scenes that Van Embden evokes. The elongated, narrow canvases constrain the composition but further advance this notion of distillation and purity - drawing attention to intuitive gestural marks that express the essence of the remembered landscapes that Van Embden renders. The monochromatic palette and sparse mark-making reinforce the exhibition’s conceptual and visual unity, offering a perceivable “gauge” for viewers to sense the subtle modulations of energy, mood, and memory that inform each piece. European art traditions—such as the black of Rembrandt’s mezzotints or the gold leaf reminiscent of Sienese altarpieces—subtly filter into the format and surface treatment of her works. Yet, it is through the embrace of Asian art’s ethos and techniques that Van Embden finds a language capable of holding both stillness and flux, memory and presence. Ultimately, “Mountain + Water” is not only the distillation of the two titular elements of the landscape as per Chinese tradition, but an inquiry into the act of seeing and remembering. The paintings manifest as products of different cultures and histories, offering a space where personal experience and collective tradition can meet. For Van Embden, the horizon is not merely observed, but lived—transformed through ink, intuition, and the purity of line into a record of what is both fleeting and eternal.