Dolores de Sade

Biography

De Sade is a contemporary artist whose work redefines the concept of landscape in the digital age. Rather than focusing on iconic vistas or grand panoramas, she turns her attention to the overlooked and seemingly ordinary spaces of daily life—highway shoulders, public footpaths, windowsills, and front gardens. Through her prints, these modest places are transformed into sites of reflection, memory, and quiet beauty.

Her work is rooted in an exploration of how landscapes shape, and are shaped by, memory and nostalgia. She examines the ways we perceive, recall, and reinterpret the environments we move through, often highlighting the tension between personal recollection and collective archetypes. De Sade is particularly interested in how landscape imagery has functioned historically as a bearer of knowledge and authority. Drawing inspiration from eighteenth- and nineteenth-century book and periodical illustration, she studies how early mass media presented information as truth while shaping cultural identity.

This historical perspective becomes a lens through which De Sade engages with the present. She sees strong parallels between the challenges posed by the rise of printing technologies in the eighteenth century—when an overwhelming flow of images transformed society’s relationship to information—and today’s digital world, where tools like Google Maps and online imagery shape our perceptions of place.

Technically, her work demonstrates a refined sensitivity to printmaking traditions while addressing contemporary issues. This blend of old and new makes her landscapes resonate both visually and conceptually, encouraging viewers to question how landscapes are constructed, remembered, and mediated through technology.

Her achievements have been recognized internationally, with her works entering numerous prestigious collections. Institutions that hold her art include the Victoria and Albert Museum and the British Library in London, the Royal Shakespeare Company, the Royal College of Art, the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, as well as the Ministry of Culture in Thailand and the Guanglan and Guangdong Museums in China.