Nature returns in Mark Dion's installation in which a stuffed wolf stands on a hardware store trailer. Society, it seems, has incorporated the wild animal as a mere object. The US artist's display is a stark criticism of human civilization.

British artist Richard Long uses "raw materials and my human scale in the reality of landscapes." Stones and rocks he finds on his walks are favorite materials. The above color photo shows a natural rock formation in a desert in Egypt.

Pieter Hugo took the photo of the man and the monkey on a market in Asaba, Nigeria. What is the story behind the South African artist's seemingly everyday snapshot? Hugo presents Africa as a continent of extreme opposites, and many of his critical works of have become iconic.

This small sculpture displayed on a stand under glass could just as well be entitled: I used to be a computer. Swiss artist Charriere forms sculptures made from tiny bits of computer scraps and artificial lava. "We have lost all understanding of nature," says Charriere, who regards him self as a cultural archeologist.

In the early days of his career, Gerhard Richter was fascinated by motives in the wild. Empty, craggy mountain landscapes, the stark contrasts of light and shadow, interested the German painter. But he never went on a mountain expedition himself and instead used photographs as inspiration for his painted "Himalaya" works on canvas.

This large-scale photo of trees in a forest is a bit eerie. Danish-born Joachim Koester traveled across Europe for his forest motifs. In the border area between Poland and Belarus, he took pictures of Europe's oldest remaining original forest, which was also a bloody battle field in WWII.

Henri Rousseau presented his famous painting of a lion pouncing on an antelope at the prestigious Paris Salon d'Automne art exhibition in 1905, side by side with paintings by the controversial the Fauves group. Rousseau's painting was deemed unsophisticated, while the Fauvist artists, including Henri Matisse, rewrote art history with their works.

As the exhibition catalog states: "The utopia of a natural state remote from culture and human influ­ence seems anachro­nistic. And yet the exam­i­na­tion of tradi­tional images and fictions of wilder­ness seems more alive than ever before." "Wilderness" is on at Schirn Kunsthalle in Frankfurt until February 3, 2019. Author: Heike Mund/db

Mount Triglav lends its name to Slovenia's only national park. The origin of the name, which means "three-headed," is disputed. Some attribute it to the mountain's three-peaked appearance from certain angles. Others claim a Slavic deity of the same name has his throne at the summit. If so, he must have a breathtaking view of its forested slopes, and meadows strewn with wildflowers.

Protected for centuries as a hunting ground for Polish and then Russian monarchs, Bialowieza National Park retains the last of Europe's primeval lowland forest. Once under royal patronage, its native bison were hunted to extinction by the early 20th century. But they have since been reintroduced, and several herds thrive in the ancient woodland.

Saxon Switzerland National Park lies on the German border with the Czech Republic. For creative inspiration, you could follow in the footsteps of German romantic painters who captured the park's sculptural rock formations. The Malerweg - or "Painter's Path" - consists of 112 kilometers (70 miles) of hiking trails that lead through otherworldly sandstone columns, crags and canyons.

In Greek mythology, Typhon, father of all monsters, battled with Zeus until the king of the gods trapped him under Mount Etna. The lava that spits and bubbles from Europe's most active volcano might have you believe Typhon is still waiting for his furious revenge. But volcanoes also make for fertile soils, so Etna National Park is home to some of Sicily's lushest, vineyard-scattered landscapes.

More than a million visitors flock to Croatia's Plitvice National Park each year to see its network of 16 lakes linked by waterfalls, and the travertine limestone they have carved into undulating steps. It also provided a dramatic location for the Winnetou films - Germany's own cowboy movies based on the books of Karl May.

A range of the Western Carpathian Mountains, the Tatra Mountains span national parks in Poland and Slovakia. Brown bear, lynx, wolves, chamois and marmots are among the fauna at home in its dense forests and alpine meadows. Its majestic birds of prey - including the lesser spotted eagle - have perhaps the best view of these soaring peaks and glistening lakes.

Walter Scott penned his poem "Lady of the Lake" in Trossachs. Loch Lomond and The Trossachs National Park provide plenty of inspiration for such an epic. Osprey skim the surface of its countless freshwater lakes in search of salmon, while Iron Age hut circles, standing stones, a Viking graveyard and the remains of crannogs - ancient manmade islands - tell tales of Scotland's distant past.

Gran Paradiso was Italy's first national park, founded in 1920 to protect the Alpine ibex - then on the brink of extinction. Today, visitors have a fair change of spotting the impressively horned goats in the park's elevated meadows. The bearded vulture, reintroduced 100 years after the last of its species was shot in the park in 1912, looks set to become another restoration success story there.