The Sun Picture—Matts Leiderstam, Prince Eugen's Altar Piece, and the Move of Kiruna Church

When the Kiruna church is moved from its location in the low mountain area to its new home in August 2025, its famous altarpiece, painted by Prince Eugen, will also be moving with it. In this exhibition, the artist Matts Leiderstam has delved into the history of the painting's creation, with a particular interest in the prince's sketches and ideas. A 1:1 sketch is on view in the lobby of the city hall. Through his own painting, and based on a long-standing fascination with the view of the landscape, Leiderstam studies how light, especially sunlight, shapes the altarpiece.
The exhibition weaves together Leiderstam's own research with previous research on the altarpiece, and is presented in text, painting and installation. The solar panel consists of five parts, each reflecting different aspects of the altarpiece, but also the many ways in which Leiderstam approaches it. Also on display are works from the Kiruna municipality's collections by artists who were close to the prince and who depicted the early years of the city of Kiruna. The exhibition is organized in collaboration with the museum Prins Eugens Waldemarsudde, where it will be shown during the winter of 2025-2026.
In a public vote during the Swedish Year of Architecture 2001, Kiruna Church was voted “Best building of all time, built before 1950”. The church was designed by Gustaf Wickman, who is said to have been inspired by both Norwegian stave churches and Sami huts. It was completed in 1912, at which time Prince Eugen's altarpiece was also in place. Now, just over a hundred years later, the church has to be moved due to cracks caused by LKAB's mining operations, making large parts of the old city center uninhabitable.
The unusual altarpiece, without a cross or biblical figures, is included in the move because it is glued in place and impossible to remove from the church. At the center of the painting is a brightly lit grove of trees in a field. It is a quiet, southern landscape far from the mountain world of Kiruna. Here it is nature that is animated and carries the spiritual. Perhaps this is also a glimpse of the Kiruna landscape of the future that the prince has unintentionally managed to depict, a landscape that is not only being reshaped from below by mining, but which may have a completely different flora as a result of climate change.

Images: Matts Leiderstam.