»For me there is no greater effigy of the world and life than the tree« Christian Morgenstern

With our daily contact with trees, the many stories that surround them as well as their powerful symbolism, artists from antiquity to the present day have been inspired to choose the tree as a pictorial motif. Initially an element of pictorial composition that served to illustrate myths and stories, the tree increasingly came to communicate the central message of the Romantic image. Artists from the 20th and 21st centuries reveal how unabated its spell and multi-faceted its significance remains.

Magdalena Abakanowicz, Aljoscha, Nikos Aslanidis, Georg Baselitz, Herbert Beck, Stefania Beretta, Tony Bevan, Nicole Bianchet, Karl Bohrmann, Alkis Boutlis, Joachim Brohm, Jonas Burgert, Marc Chagall, Sonia Mehra Chawla, Joachim Elzmann, Mitch Epstein, Max Ernst, Elger Esser, Ori Gersht, Wolf Hamm, Andrea C. Hoffer, Katie Holten, Leiko Ikemura, Hugó Johann, Akane Kimbara, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Karin Kneffel, Oskar Kokoschka, Victor Kraus, Susanne Kühn, Desmond Lazaro, Robert Longo, Sophia Loth, Britta Lumer, Heinz Mack, August Macke, Hedwig Marquardt, Pascale Marthine Tayou, Richard Mosse, Hartmut Neumann, Heribert C. Ottersbach, Apostolos Palavrakis, Sigmar Polke, Christian Rohlfs, Robert Schad, Ursula Schulz-Dornburg, Valentina Seidel, Emma Stibbon, Geoff Uglow, Christian Weihrauch, Stefan à Wengen, René Wirths, Thomas Wrede, Kailiang Yang