The Eckersberg Medal 2025 – Visual artist Trine Søndergaard

In Trine Søndergaard’s works, one can clearly feel the camera’s fragmentation of time. The outer world stands still in a frozen moment, allowing new layers of meaning to emerge.

Trine Søndergaard addresses concepts such as time, collective memory, visibility, and forgetfulness. Her works raise existential questions and explore what it means to exist in time. She examines gender as a historical, cultural, and lived phenomenon and engages with nature as the incomprehensible continuum that is the prerequisite for human existence.

Søndergaard often turns to the historical and stages encounters between the past and the present, most famously in her series showing women dressed in local costumes and headgear from an almost forgotten cultural heritage. The precision in the photography allows the eye to linger on the obvious anachronisms in the meeting between living skin and glimpses of a past female life. Here, women are photographed in Danish regional costumes, covering their faces as closely as a niqab – and here, the skin shines through a nylon lace camisole under a gold-embroidered cap.

At first glance, the photographs seem documentary in their precision, but in the carefully staged setting and reduction of the image’s elements, a poetry of absence arises. Like in the Baroque world, the surfaces and their enticing tactility appear as a thin membrane that encapsulates the mystery of time and the reality of death. Here, an undertow of melancholy, time, and loss is felt, where the image stands as a state beyond language.

For this unique artistic practice and refined use of the photographic medium, Trine Søndergaard is awarded the Eckersberg Medal in 2025.