Artist Celebrates the Timelessness of Nature Through Animal Gods

“Aspect of Autumn.”

Across all of art history, nature has remained a timeless subject. It served as a symbol of rebirth and transformation in Sandro Botticelli’s Primavera. It was personified in Giuseppe Arcimboldo’s iconic The Four Seasons. It influenced several significant art movements, ranging from Romanticism to Impressionism. Now, it’s also at the core of Martin Wittfooth’s latest solo exhibition, Deus ex Terra.

Wittfooth has long focused on nature in his art, but Deus ex Terra is perhaps his most ambitious and comprehensive work yet. If its title is any indication, the exhibition revolves around a series of gods that hail from the earth, all characterized not as human figures but as wild animals. The Canadian artist clearly has a preference for horses, but wolves, deer, polar bears, and rams also figure strongly in his monumental oil paintings. In Wittfooth’s new works, these animals don’t merely exist within our natural world. Instead, they determine it, actively shaping and embodying organic rhythms, cycles, and principles.

For those reasons, Deus ex Terra can be best understood as an exhibition in two parts: one dedicated to the four seasons, and the other to the four elements. Each painting visualizes the essence of its theme, repeating familiar symbols that point us toward their meaning. Aspect of Winter, for instance, depicts a wolf towering over an ice floe, its blue pelt frozen with densely packed snow. Even without knowing its title, the painting is clearly recognizable as a winter scene, complete with a striking color palette and a desolate, frigid landscape.

Aspect of Autumn is similarly approachable, showcasing a massive deer trudging through a birch forest. Its head is masked by a flurry of orange and red leaves, which gently peel away and sink toward the earth below. Also crowning the deer’s skull are a massive pair of antlers, sprouting and snaking through the sky much like the other trees that frame the canvas. That the deer’s antlers and the surrounding birches so closely resemble one another speaks to the painting’s essential harmony. Here, there is no separation between an animal, a season, and nature.

As for the four elements, Wittfooth returns to horses. Air is expressed as a billowing cloud in the shape of a horse’s head; fire as a volcano riddled with cracks and molten lava; earth as an ancient collection of fossils, mushrooms, and ferns; and water as a submerged sculpture, overtaken by seaweed, fish, and barnacles. There’s a fascinating contrast in these paintings, where horses, often agile and swift, are rendered as permanent fixtures of nature, their existence stretching back millions of years.

That continuity is, of course, the entire point. Deus ex Terra not only celebrates nature’s sublimity, but reveals how eternal it is—or, more accurately, how eternal it should be. For years, Wittfooth has been preoccupied with humanity’s troubled relationship with nature, whether it be through the ongoing climate crisis or resource exploitation. This exhibition insists that we confront the forces that have governed our world for millennia. After all, nature predates human life.

Martin Wittfooth: Deus ex Terra is now on view at Corey Helford Gallery in Los Angeles through October 4, 2025.

In his latest solo exhibition, Deus ex Terra, Canadian artist Martin Wittfooth explores the four seasons through evocative animal deities.