WE'VE all heard of extreme sports, even extremists, but what about extreme landscape art? Well, that's the subject of a show at the Hunterdon Museum of Art in Clinton, which includes about 40 paintings, sculptures and prints by artists from the United States and Italy. All, according to the wall text, ''share an interest in taking landscape to an extreme.'' Sounds scary.
Housed in a renovated 1836 stone mill on the south branch of the scenic Raritan River, in the middle of suburban New Jersey, the Hunterdon seems like an unlikely setting for an ''extreme landscape'' show. Be that as it may, the show looks great here, expertly installed throughout the museum's spacious, warehouse-like interior by the curator Donna Gustafson.
Extreme landscape suggests ideas of landscapes on the edge, or at least beyond our usual experience. That's just what Diane Burko delivers in her big, colorful paintings of volcanic eruptions and lava flows carving their way across coastal plateaus to the sea. It is hard to imagine a more extreme landscape than this. It's also hard to imagine why anyone would want to paint this subject. It's so, well, extreme.
