Northern Lights

Edvard Munch,Train Smoke (detail), 1900. Photo: Munchmuseet/Halvor Bjørngård

Northern Lights presents 74 landscape paintings by artists from Scandinavia and Canada produced between 1888 and 1937, among them masterpieces by Hilma af Klint and Edvard Munch. These artists all share the boreal forest as a common source of inspiration. The seemingly boundless expanses of the forest, the radiant light of endless summer days, the long winter nights and natural phenomena such as the northern lights gave rise to a specifically Nordic form of modern painting, which to this day exerts enduring appeal and fascination. The boreal forest, which stretches south and north of the polar circle, forming one of our planet’s largest primeval forests, was increasingly represented as a spiritual landscape.

The exhibition provides an opportunity to trace the development of Nordic landscape painting in modern art through selected works by Helmi Biese, Anna Boberg, Emily Carr, Prince Eugen, Gustaf Fjæstad, Akseli Gallen-Kallela, Lawren S. Harris, Hilma af Klint, J. E. H. MacDonald, Edvard Munch, Ivan Shishkin, Harald Sohlberg and Tom Thomson, in the process discovering artists likely still unknown to many visitors.

Accompanying the exhibition, a new digital installation by contemporary Danish artist Jakob Kudsk Steensen (*1987) is on display. In “Boreal Dreams”, the artist explores the effects of the climate crisis on the ecosystem of the boreal zone by conceiving virtual worlds based on scientific data collected through fieldwork and on gaming technology.