Among Trees
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.