From 6 September 2026, Villa Schöningen presents “Zwischen Bäumen”, an exhibition organised in cooperation with the Berlin-based exhibition platform PASSAGE. Bringing together around 90 works by more than 60 international artists spanning three centuries, the exhibition explores the forest as artistic motif, site of memory, and space of cultural projection. Historical paintings, drawings, and photographs enter into dialogue with contemporary sculptures, installations, and paintings, offering a multifaceted perspective on one of the oldest and, at the same time, most pressing subjects in art history. The exhibition is curated by Victor Auberjonois.

By inviting Victor Auberjonois to curate the exhibition, Villa Schöningen deliberately opens its programme to a new curatorial perspective. The collaboration reflects the institution’s commitment to approaching historical and contemporary art from continually shifting viewpoints and to allowing the site itself to be read anew through different curatorial positions. Auberjonois brings international contemporary art into dialogue with works from the Döpfner Collection and significant historical loans. This dialogical approach to the collection reflects Villa Schöningen’s understanding of art history not as a closed narrative, but as a living body of work that can be questioned and reconsidered from the perspective of each new present.

The exhibition’s focus on the forest is closely connected to the site itself. Villa Schöningen is embedded within Potsdam’s historic park landscape, shaped by Peter Joseph Lenné and Gustav Meyer and forming part of one of Europe’s most significant cultural landscapes. In the nineteenth century, architecture, garden design, and landscape were conceived here as an interconnected whole. Nature at this site therefore never appears as untouched wilderness, but as a cultivated cultural space. Even before entering the exhibition, visitors move through a landscape that has, for almost two hundred years, reflected the ways in which humans shape, stage, and perceive nature. “Zwischen Bäumen” thus begins not within the exhibition galleries, but in the park surrounding Villa Schöningen.

Few motifs have accompanied the history of art as persistently as the forest. Its meaning has continually shifted in response to the ideas and challenges of its time. In the early modern period, the forest appears as a setting for biblical, mythological, and courtly narratives. Romanticism rediscovered it as a place of longing, spirituality, and the sublime, as well as a counterworld to a rapidly changing society. With industrialisation, the forest took on a new role: as cities expanded and landscapes were increasingly transformed by economic development, it came to symbolise a supposedly pristine nature whose disappearance was already becoming perceptible. With Impressionism, the perspective shifted once again. Artists became less concerned with the symbolic meaning of the forest and increasingly interested in light, atmosphere, and the fleeting nature of perception. At the same time, works by artists such as Carl Spitzweg and Max Liebermann continue to shape our image of the forest as a place of recreation and contemplation.

The contemporary positions in the exhibition engage with these art-historical traditions while expanding them through new questions. Trees no longer appear solely as elements of landscape or Romantic symbols, but as living organisms, witnesses to time, and actors within complex ecological systems. Artists such as Alicja Kwade, Julius von Bismarck, and Michael Sailstorfer question the relationship between humans and nature, as well as our ideas of time, materiality, and memory. In this context, the forest becomes a mirror for current social debates surrounding climate change, biodiversity loss, resource consumption, and the coexistence of human and non-human forms of life.

In “Zwischen Bäumen”, historical and contemporary works do not encounter one another as opposites, but as part of an ongoing conversation. Spanning three centuries, the exhibition traces how our ideas of nature continually change and how each era produces its own images of the forest.

Today, the forest has once again acquired a particular urgency. It is a place of retreat and longing, while at the same time becoming a symbol of an ecological crisis whose consequences are being felt across the world. Between scientific knowledge, political debate, and personal experience, our perception of trees is undergoing a fundamental transformation. Perhaps forests today tell us less about nature itself than about our relationship with it.

“Zwischen Bäumen” invites visitors to take time for this encounter: between art and landscape, history and the present, culture and nature. If every era creates its own forest, what image of the forest will we leave to future generations?

Pola van den Hövel