girl in red & Edvard Munch: Norwegian Summer

5 February – 9 May

Bright summer evenings, sunbathers on smooth rocks, and melancholic sunsets set the mood as girl in red’s music meets Edvard Munch’s vibrant paintings. In the exhibition girl in red & Edvard Munch: Norwegian Summer at MUNCH, creates a unique envolving soundscape, where sound and image, light and darkness, joy and melancholy interact.

Even before visitors enter the exhibition room on the museum’s tenth floor, they can hear the music. It gradually becomes more distinct as they move further down the corridor toward the monumental exhibition space. Only once they are fully inside can the musical work be experienced in its entirety. When they turn around, they encounter Munch’s large and small paintings, mounted alternately and stretching several metres up the largest wall. In this way, a space emerges where the paintings are not merely viewed, but also experienced through sound, rhythm, and atmosphere.

Marie Ulven Ringheim, better known as girl in red, has specially composed Norwegian Summer for a selection of 22 paintings by Edvard Munch. The musical work is exploratory and moves between different moods with the two artistic expressions elevating and reinforcing one another.

The paintings reveal a side of Munch’s artistic practice that may come as a surprise: a fresh, bright, and summery lightness. Bright summer evenings and vivid motifs characterise the paintings, while the people depicted carry emotions and experiences that extend far beyond the summery setting itself. Together with girl in red’s music, the works open up new ways of approaching Munch’s paintings and the people who inhabit them.

Ulven writes:

“When I sat down with the selection of paintings and started making the music, I wanted to expand the spaces within them. I thought about all the people in each image. I thought of their longing, desire, joy, loss and sadness. I thought about the tension that exists on a summer night. The feeling that anything could happen, and the crushing disappointment when things do not turn out as hoped. Because even the brightest Norwegian summer holds a shadow of darkness.”

Ulven’s encounter with Munch is also rooted in her personal history. Having grown up in Horten, near Munch’s summer house in Åsgårdstrand, she has had a close relationship with Munch’s art since she was a child. This has given her a broad range of references and personal knowledge of the artist’s work, which she brings into her work on the exhibition.

“Norwegian Summer gives us the opportunity to experience Munch through a new artistic perspective. girl in red highlights the breadth of the paintings and shows us that light and bright motifs are also central to Munch’s artistic practice,” says the exhibition’s curator, Trine Otte Bak Nielsen.

girl in red & Edvard Munch: Norwegian Summer invites visitors into a Norwegian summer where bright evenings and dark minds exist side by side. It is an encounter between two artistic practices from different eras, connected by an interest in human emotions, desire, longing, and vulnerability.