ZWISCHEN BÄUMEN: Group Show - Villa Schöningen

Zwischen Bäumen brings together 60 artists across three centuries of painting, drawing, sculpture and photography.

Few motifs have accompanied art history as persistently as the forest. It has shifted from a setting for biblical and mythological narratives to a Romantic space of longing, spirituality and the sublime, and later a subject through which artists explored light, atmosphere and perception. Zwischen Bäumen brings these moments into conversation, allowing historical and contemporary works to meet across generations.

Villa Schöningen is embedded within Potsdam’s historic park and lake landscape, shaped in the nineteenth century by Peter Joseph Lenné and Gustav Meyer. Nature here is both grown and composed. As the landscape outside moves from late summer through autumn and winter into spring, the works inside enter into quiet dialogue with the seasons.

Zwischen Bäumen offers no fixed thesis. Instead, it creates a space to slow down, to look and to be moved, returning to beauty, reflection and imagination, and to the simple pleasure of looking.

Over its seven-month duration, the exhibition extends through readings and classical music performances. Romanticism, so influential in shaping our image of the forest, found some of its most powerful expressions in art, literature and music, bringing these traditions together within the landscape of the Villa.

Ultimately, Zwischen Bäumen returns to a simple experience: standing among the trees. Between art and landscape, history and the present, the cultivated and the wild, the exhibition invites us simply to look.

FLOOR PLAN