Sublime for contemporary eyes

It's a risky strategy exhibiting among great works of the past but, just occasionally, both past and present are enriched by the interaction.

This is the case with Dusseldorf-born artist Mariele Neudecker, who's showing as part of an occasional Tate Britain series that sees contemporary artists among its collection of Turners and 19th-century Romantics.

Neudecker recreates paintings from German Romanticism into brilliant three dimensions. These miniaturised worlds recreate the sublime for contemporary eyes, evoking Caspar David Friedrich, Karl Friedrich Schinkel and the later Swiss symbolist painter Arnold Bocklin.

Her materials are pedestrian: fibreglass and plastic, acrylic and food dye, supplemented by the clever use of water and light, but the effect is still convincingly sublime.

Three vitrines, Over And Over, offer a vista of mountainous hollows and grottoes, in milky hues of blue and green. Shrouded by mist and submerged in water, the scenes suggest a silent underworld, vast beyond its confines. Another shows a forest, knobbly trunks emerging from blue mist, while its lightdappled shadow plays upon a wall.

In Another Day, two video screens showcase a simultaneous recording of the sun rising and setting in opposite parts of the globe: South-East Australia and the western Azores. Such representations, done to death by video artists as well as artists of the past, are in danger of becoming nothing more than good-looking clichès.

But so fresh and convincing is Neudecker's take on old themes that one is inevitably drawn in and won over.

Until Mar 6, Tate Britain, Millbank SW1, daily 10am to 5.50pm, free. Tel: 020 7887 8008. Tube: Pimlico