In October John Martin Gallery will present Uwe Walther’s latest exhibition of map paintings from the last three years. The exhibition presents a series of alpine landscapes imagined from the original Swiss maps on which they are painted.

The exhibition follows Uwe Walther’s highly successful first UK show with John Martin Gallery in 2015 and will also include a recent series based on British Ordnance Survey maps.

Uwe Walther fascination with maps stems from his childhood in East Germany. His Father worked as a surveyor and his Mother as a Government cartographer, so the artist was always deeply aware of their construction but also of the political and strategic implications inherent in their design and publication.

Having moved to Switzerland from Leipzig in 1990, Walther became enchanted both with the Alps (as a climber and skier) and the legendary Swiss maps that document them. In 2010 he began to paint on the maps themselves, using their language of contours, codes and symbols as a filigree over which he could create expansive landscapes of mountains and skies, entirely up-ending the traditional perspective of a cartographer.