FREE for members
Floor 3, Gundlach Building

4–7 pm
Exhibition Preview for Members | Gundlach Building, Floor 3

4:30–6:30 pm
Reception for Members | Gundlach Building, Sculpture Terrace (Floor 2)

Northern Lights features seventy-one landscape paintings by artists from Scandinavia and Canada created between 1880 and 1930, among them masterpieces by Edvard Munch, Hilma af Klint, Emily Carr, and Tom Thomson. The boreal forest—a global belt of evergreen forests that hugs the Arctic Circle—was a shared source of inspiration for a new kind of modernist painting. The Northern region’s seemingly boundless expanses of forest, the radiant light of endless summer days, the long winter nights, and natural phenomena such as the aurora borealis gave rise to a specifically Nordic form of modern painting whose appeal and fascination endures to this day. In the works on view, the boreal forest takes on the quality of a spiritual landscape.

The exhibition presents paintings by Helmi Biese, Anna Boberg, Emily Carr, Prince Eugen, Gustaf Fjæstad, Akseli Gallen-Kallela, Lawren Harris, Hilma af Klint, J.E.H. MacDonald, Edvard Munch, Harald Sohlberg, and Tom Thomson. 

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Voices in Contemporary Art

A Voices in Contemporary Art discussion will immediately follow this members' preview. Join us for a conversation with Helga Christofferson, Curator-at-Large and Curator of the Nordic Art and Culture Initiative; Ulf Küster, Senior Curator, Fondation Beyeler; and Katerina Atanassova, Senior Curator of Canadian Art at the National Gallery of Canada, as they further illuminate the traditions of Nordic and Canadian landscape painting and discuss the exhibition’s creation and journey from Fondation Beyeler to the Buffalo AKG.