Early next year, the Fondation Beyeler will be presenting the group exhibition ‘Northern Lights’. It will feature around 80 landscape paintings by artists from Scandinavia and Canada, created between 1880 and 1930, including masterpieces by Hilma af Klint and Edvard Munch. What unites them is the boreal forest as a common source of inspiration. The vast wooded expanses, the radiant light of endless summer days, the long winter nights and natural phenomena such as the northern lights – these elements resulted in a specifically Nordic form of modern painting, which continues to exert a particular appeal and fascination to this day. In this era, the boreal forest – one of the world’s largest primeval forests, extending north and south of the Arctic Circle – was increasingly depicted as a landscape of the soul. This is the first time that these works have been presented in such a configuration in Europe.

An exhibition by the Fondation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel, and the Buffalo AKG Art Museum, Buffalo, New York.