At the Albertina Edvard Munch face to face with contemporary art – Mondo
Edvard Munch, Street of Aasgaardstrand, 1901, Oil on canvas, Kunstmuseum Basel, Gift of Sigrid Schwarz von Spreckelsen and Sigrid Katharina Schwarz, 1979 | Photo: © Martin P. Bühler, Kunstmuseum Basel
This is how his friend Christian Krohg wrote about Edvard Munch. Words that were echoed many years later by the painter’s promise in his Saint Cloud Manifesto: “There will no longer be interior scenes with people reading and women writing a shirt. Living beings who have breathed, felt, suffered and loved will paint themselves ”.
This extraordinary ability to express and communicate the emotions of humanity has seduced numerous artists of the twentieth century who shared with Munch not only his melancholy vision of the world, but were seduced by the experimental approach to painting and printing techniques, by the way unique of the colleague to use the color, the stroke, the pigment.
Edvard Munch, The Kiss, 1921, Oil on canvas, Sarah Campbell Blaffer Foundation, Houston
In this sense, the Norwegian painter has shaped and continues to shape the history of painting today, becoming a pioneer of modern and contemporary art, as demonstrated by over 60 works of his. An exhibition, the flagship event of the Albertina in Vienna, will tell the influence of Munch on contemporary artists through an evocative dialogue between masterpieces.
From February 18th to June 19th the review Evdard Munch. In dialogue will sew a confrontation between the father de The Scream and seven illustrious colleagues of the twentieth century. Georg Baselitz, Andy Warhol, Miriam Cahn, Peter Doig, Marlene Dumas, Tracy Emin and Jasper Johns will be on show in Vienna with works that they have defined close, in subject and style, to the works of the Norwegian painter.
The approaches to Munch proposed by the Albertina exhibition will be as diverse as the artists are. The forests, the snow-covered landscapes of Georg Baselitz meets the icons that Andy Warhol recreates in a very personal way, like the famous one Scream (after Munch). The South African artist Marlene Dumas, on the other hand, relies on her wide chromatic palette, crossed by dark shades altering to pastels and fluorescent colors, themes related to human experience, placing at the center of her work themes ranging from love to racism, from death to mourning. The emotions that the Basel painter Miriam Cahn places at the center of her work, from desperation to fear to unbridled aggression, meet the languages of Peter Doig who sees in the materiality in Munch’s paintings the iconology of the alienation of humanity.
Andy Warhol, The Scream (after Munch), 1984, Screen printing on Lenox, Museum Board Mikkel Dobloug | Photo: © Kjell S Stenmarch, Grev Wedels Plass Auksjoner © The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. / License Bildrecht, Wien 2021
Tracey Emin’s multimedia works, interwoven with personal experiences, also hint at the autobiographical nature of Munch’s work.
The Albertina exhibition, which follows on from record-breaking Munch reviews by the Viennese museum in 2003 and 2015, focuses primarily on the artist’s later work and is supported by the Munch Museet and the National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design of Oslo and numerous other international institutions and private collections.
Georg Baselitz, Winter, 2005, Oil on canvas, Vienna, Albertina Museum – The Batliner Collection © Georg Baselitz
Read also:
• The new Munch Museum opens: avant-garde architecture and a record collection overlooking the fjord
• Munch’s Scream has a new home