Skovgaard Museet
January 31, 2026 – May 31, 2026

Dialogue exhibition EVERY STONE MUST BE TURNED at Skovgaard Museet

Trine Søndergaard, Coordinates 56.6732067, 9.9470901, 2025, Archival pigment print

The exhibition EVERY STONE MUST BE TURNED explores the stone as both a natural phenomenon and an artistic object. With a focus on P.C. Skovgaard (1818–1875), renowned for his landscape paintings of beech trees from the Danish Golden Age, the exhibition offers an in-depth examination of how materials from nature—particularly stone—have inspired both Skovgaard and artists of his time.

Contemporary artists Trine Søndergaard and Regitze Engelsborg Karlsen have created new works specifically for the exhibition. Their works offer new perspectives on P.C. Skovgaard’s art and form a contrapuntal dialogue, as both artists depict nature according to their own distinct artistic agendas.

During the last Ice Age, which ended 10,700 years ago, massive boulders were carried by the ice from the mountains of Norway and Sweden to the otherwise flat terrain of Denmark. An ice sheet covering the Scandinavian highlands, formed under the cold climate of the Ice Age, moved toward lower-lying areas, bringing with it clay, sand, gravel, pebbles, and giant boulders. As the ice melted, these materials were released and came to shape the Danish landscape. Over millennia, the monumental stones have drawn human attention, and myths and folk legends emerged in attempts to explain their presence in the landscape. Søndergaard’s images of giant boulders hidden within forests and landscapes convey a physical presence so immense that the stones appear impossible to move. She works with stones as metaphors for both natural and human challenges—challenges that at times require us to forge new paths. Through Søndergaard’s works, the large stones of the Danish landscape offer a contemporary perspective on the very same elements that also fascinated P.C. Skovgaard.

Regitze Engelsborg Karlsen contributes sculptures and textual works in which she explores symbolism in nature and the act of working with stone. Taking Møns Klint and the geological structure of its chalk cliffs as her point of departure, she approaches the material both sculpturally and textually. Regitze works with the stone’s symbolic significance as mountain, conveying its poetic and geological layers.