KNAUSGÅRD THROWS NEW LIGHT ON MUNCH

PRESS PREVIEW: 

3 MAY 

THE MUNCH MUSEUM, OSLO

The author Karl Ove Knausgård is curator of the Munch Museum’s major event that opens on 6 May. The exhibition is entitled Towards the Forest. Knausgård on Munch and represents his debut as exhibition curator. In it, Knausgård examines Edvard Munch’s diversity as an artist – his creative passion and ruthlessness – while drawing particular attention to lesser-known works.

It is not every day that writers have the opportunity to mount exhibitions in our art museums. The idea behind the Munch Museum’s invitation to Knausgård was a desire for an alternative, fresh gaze, or light, on Munch’s oeuvre. The exhibition demonstrates in practice the special ability Knausgård has to penetrate into what art is fundamentally about and its ability to depict the unsayable. He describes it as follows:

I wanted to show unknown pictures, based on the notion that one might then see Munch as though for the first time, as the person he was, a painter who never found repose, and who never stagnated.

Without taking into consideration biography or chronology, the exhibition’s four “chapters” explore Munch’s prodigious creative passion and relentless compulsion to continuously experiment with new techniques and surfaces. The exhibition’s main sections are presented as a journey that begins in light and harmony, continues through darkness and chaos, to then return to a controllable reality. Instead of highlighting individual works, Knausgård’s curatorial idea is to create comprehensive moods and resonances that reverberate through the gallery rooms.

The first room is harmonious and bright, with sunny motifs of gardens and parks peopled by human figures. In the next section the motifs are gradually emptied of figures, which Knausgård describes as follows: “The landscapes that are left standing alone are ambivalent entities – the isolation of the deserted panoramas are contrasted by the forces and brutality of nature: for Munch the forest was not only a place where something ended, but also a place where something began.”

The third section moves from the outer world to an inner realm, into chaos and imperfection; a kind of laboratory of creative energy. Here the paintings hang with tears and nicks that reveal how imperfections, careless brushstrokes, and dripping paint were cultivated by Munch, rather than concealed or covered up.

The title “Towards the Forest” reminds us of the threat and invisible forces inherent in nature, but also of nature in art. In the last section we abandon the inner world and emerge into the physical world again. In this room many of Munch portraits are mounted, because, as Knausgård states, “Munch’s art is about relations, relationships to other people, and I wanted to visualise this in a simple way. At the same time Munch was a fantastic portrait painter; he not only perceived the essence of a person, he could also capture their personality and convey it, just as he could a landscape or a tree”.

The exhibition consists of more than a hundred paintings, several sculptures and numerous graphic works. It has been developed in close collaboration with the Munch Museum’s curator Kari J. Brandtzæg.

The exhibition opens on 6 May and runs until 8 October 2017

The book Så mye lengsel på så liten flate (So Much Longing on such a Small Surface)will be published in conjunction with the exhibition. In it, Knausgård writes primarily about his own personal relationship to Munch, never far removed from the equally fundamental as naïve question of what art is, and what it is good for. The book’s publication is a collaboration between the Munch Museum and Forlaget Oktober, Oslo.

Karl Ove Knausgård (b.1968) achieved enormous international acclaim with his six-tome series My Struggle 1-6. His first novel, Out of the World (1998) was awarded the Norwegian Critics’ Prize for Literature and since then he has reaped great recognition for his many books, articles and essays. Last year he received the Sunday Times Award for Literary Excellence, and in 2015 he was awarded the Die Welt Literature Prize for his collected works as well as the Wall Street Journal’s Innovator Award for Literature. Knausgård’s most recent book series is related to the four seasons, the latest of which, Om Sommeren (On Summer), was published in August 2016.