Edvard Munch: The Modern Eye at Schirn Kunsthalle on artrepublic.com
Exhibition running from Feb 09 2012
until May 13 2012
Edvard Munch is acclaimed for his emotional Symbolist painting and regarded as a pioneer of Expressionism. This exhibition offers a new view of his work showing Edvard Munch was a modern artist to his core with over one hundred and thirty works. “Edvard Munch. The Modern Eye” gives the little-researched late work until 1944 special emphasis and proves that Munch was not only an artist of the nineteenth, but also of the twentieth century. The presentation focuses on Munch’s engagement with modern techniques like photography and film or the intimate theatre stage. A study of his works reveals the degree to which the artist adopted specifically photographic or filmic forms of composition and narration, poses, and even effects in his painting. Besides the approximately sixty paintings and twenty works on paper, two chapters of the presentation are reserved for Munch’s own production as a photographer and filmmaker. Fifty vintage photographs as well as four films will be included in the show. A further dimension of the exhibition highlights how the artist dealt with one and the same motif in drawing, photography, painting, the field of graphic art, and even sculpture and shows that the frequent return to certain motifs constitutes an important key for understanding Munch’s oeuvre. Contrary to received opinion, which describes Munch as a tormented and reclusive man in the last three decades of his life, the exhibition “Edvard Munch. The Modern Eye” shows the artist abreast of his day’s aesthetic debates and demonstrates that he was involved in an ongoing dialogue with the most recent forms of representation in his production. Presented in eleven rooms and unfolding in nine thematic groups, a rich selection of important paintings and works of paper illustrates how Munch’s visits to the movies, his reading of the illustrated press, and his scientific interest informed his practice as a painter no less than his own experiments with photography and film. Likewise, his stage sets for the modern theater led to a new relationship between viewer and pictorial motif in space. Further trademarks of Munch’s late work are the numerous repetitions of subjects and the reduction to a concise form of expression frequently connected with them. OPENING HOURS: Tue, Fri, Sat: 10.00 – 19.00, Wed & Thur: 10.00 – 22.00 Image Credits: Edvard Munch, Vampire, 1893, oil on canvas, 77 x 98 cm, © The Munch Museum, © The Munch Museum / The Munch Ellingsen Group / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2012 Edvard Munch, The Girls on the Bridge, 1927, oil on canvas, 100 x 90 cm, © The Munch Museum, © The Munch Museum / The Munch Ellingsen Group / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2012 Edvard Munch, The Sun, 1910-1913, 162 x 205 cm, oil on canvas, © The Munch Museum, © The Munch Museum / The Munch Ellingsen Group / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2012  |
