From 6 September 2026 onwards, Villa Schöningen will present the exhibition Among Trees in collaboration with PASSAGE. The exhibition will bring together around 90 works by more than 60 international artists from three centuries, exploring the forest as a motif, a meaningful space, and a cultural projection surface. Historical paintings, drawings and photographs will be displayed alongside contemporary sculptures, installations and paintings. The exhibition has been curated by Victor Auberjonois.

By inviting Victor Auberjonois, Villa Schöningen is opening up its programme to a new perspective. The exhibition presents works by international contemporary artists alongside pieces from the Döpfner Collection and notable historical loans. This openness to different curatorial approaches, alongside a dialogic engagement with the collection, aligns with Villa Schöningen’s guiding principle of viewing art history as a living body of work that can be reinterpreted with each generation.

The theme of the forest is closely linked to the location itself. Nestled within Potsdam’s park landscape, designed by Peter Joseph Lenné and Gustav Meyer, Villa Schöningen is located in one of Europe’s most significant historic cultural landscapes. In the 19th century, the architecture and gardens were designed as a coherent whole, organised around visual axes. Even before visitors enter the exhibition, they are moving through a landscape that, for almost two hundred years, has told the story of how humans organise, stage and perceive nature. Therefore, Among Trees begins not in the exhibition rooms, but in the park of Villa Schöningen.

Hardly any other motif has featured so consistently in art history as the forest. Its significance has evolved alongside social perceptions over time. In the early modern period it appeared as the setting for biblical and mythological narratives. Since the 19th century, it has been regarded as a work of art in its own right. In Germany, it has been closely linked to the growing national myth, industrialisation, rural exodus, and an increasing sense of alienation from nature.

The Romantic era brought a new conception of nature: the forest became a place of recollection and a landscape of longing. It was no longer just an idyll, but a utopian ideal and a collective canvas for projection. In the work of Carl Spitzweg in particular, it appears as a primeval, wild space populated by nymphs, lovers, dwarves and philosophers. In the Brothers Grimm‘s fairy tales, the forest is depicted as an enchanted place of mystery and secrecy. Evoking a sense of unease and fascination, it is portrayed as an overwhelming natural realm, hidden deep within the thicket – a place one would prefer to avoid.

In the work of Narcisse Díaz de la Peña, a leading figure of the Barbizon School, we also see gnarled trees and dense woodland scenes. Unlike the painters of his time, who depicted idealised landscapes, Díaz de la Peña and his contemporaries painted selective views of nature that made an impact through light, atmosphere and direct experience. These landscapes, painted en plein air, laid the foundations for later Impressionist woodland scenes. Max Liebermann, for example, depicted the Grunewald as a counterpoint to the cramped bourgeois city, rendering it in radiant colours with deliberately emphasised light and shadow effects. The evenly arranged spruce trunks allude to the cultivation of the forest and thus contrast sharply with the Romantic notion of untouched wilderness.

Albert Renger-Patzsch‘s objective photographs depict rows of slender tree trunks, presenting the landscape as cultivated nature without any mythological references, in a deliberately cool visual language. We are no longer moving through a pre-industrial landscape, but a modern, rationalised one. Nevertheless, our conception of the forest is still shaped today by Spitzweg’s fairy-tale images and the aesthetic and symbolic ideas of Romanticism.

Contemporary approaches build on these art-historical traditions and expand them to include new questions. Forests and trees are no longer seen merely as landscape motifs or romantic symbols, but as living organisms, witnesses to history and key players in complex ecological systems. Artists such as Alicja Kwade, Julius von Bismarck and Michael Sailstorfer examine the relationship between humans and nature, as well as notions of time, materiality and memory.

Historical and contemporary works come together in Among Trees as part of an ongoing dialogue. Spanning three centuries, the exhibition illustrates how our perceptions of nature have evolved, showcasing the unique images of the forest produced by each era. Today, and certainly since the widespread forest die-off of the 1980s, the forest is viewed as a symbol of climate change and a vulnerable ecological space. At the same time, however, the Romantic image of the forest as a place of contemplation and longing remains in our collective consciousness. Bearing this tension in mind, our perception of the forest as a natural space is undergoing a fundamental shift: the forest is suddenly telling us more about our relationship with nature than nature itself.

Among Trees invites visitors to experience the interplay between art, landscape, history, culture and nature at their own pace. Ultimately, the exhibition poses a question that extends beyond its own boundaries: if every era gives rise to its own conception of the forest, what image of the forest will we leave behind for future generations?