Exhibition review: Looking at the View, Tate Britain

Most of us like to look at a view, though not all are fortunate enough to live with one, in which case art can offer an alternative, a window on the world. Landscape is a great solace, and particularly refreshing for the tired urban spirit, but we want more than holiday snaps of foreign places briefly visited. We need the deeper exploration of art to feed hearts and minds, an investigation through the procedures of painting and drawing, a reordering of shapes and a fitting together, a showing again under other than a purely mimetic guise. With luck and application, through bearing witness to that process of recreating, we come to greater knowledge of our world and our place within it. As D.H. Lawrence said: ‘The business of art is to reveal the relation between man and his circumambient universe, at the living moment.’

Looking at the View is a stimulating mixture of painting, photography, drawing, relief sculpture and film, a free display in the main galleries at Millbank.