In his emphatic paintings of the American highway, Allan D’Arcangelo recasts the landscape tradition to explore our separation from the natural world. ‘Aspen’ (1967) presents a remote and depersonalised landscape seen through a car windshield.  Despite being inspired by D’Arcangelo’s childhood memories, the displaced sun-lit roadway that stretches on endlessly creates a sense of anxiety. This sets D’Arcangelo’s imagery apart from other Pop era artists, who rendered even the most shocking subjects in a tone of calculated irony. Here, D’Arcangelo has graphically simplified his iconography – the land, sky, horizon, signage, road – into a flat, unarticulated surface that reveals little of D’Arcangelo's hand, nor any sense of time or place.

‘For me [the open-road imagery] came from memories. If I started to think about landscape and my experiences as a child, it seemed that the most profound experiences of landscape were looking through the windshield. This is how we experience landscape. What was curious about it was that it had a resonance all over the world. People nodded and said, yes, they know that experience.’ Allan D’Arcangelo, interviewed by Marco Livingstone in 1988