Edvard Munch Seen by Karl Ove Knausgård

He is arguably the most important and most widely read Norwegian writer working today: Karl Ove Knausgård. His six volume autobiographical novel has been among the most hotly debated global literary phenomena of recent years. Sharing his very personal perspective on the oeuvre of the painter Edvard Munch, the celebrated author now presents what is in effect the discovery a previously “unknown” Munch: a surprising selection of works that have never or only rarely been on public view. The exhibition at the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein Westfalen will open in time for the 2019 Frankfurt Book Fair, where Norway will be featured as this year’s special focus.

Knausgård, who is also a trained art historian, selected ca. 130 paintings, works on paper, and sculptures held in storage at the Munch Museum, Oslo, rounding out the show with loans from international museums. The presentation lets us see Edvard Munch probably the best known painter of the Scandinavian avant garde of the early twentieth century in a completely new light. The writer undertook an extended and probing engagement with Munch’s oeuvre. To examine the impact of selected pictures in natural settings, the artist handled some of his creations in rather unusual ways: he set them up in the open air, exposing them to the elements. These works, which were crucial to his evolution as a painter, inspired Knausgård’s searching reflections on the impulses that propel the making of art and its impact on the viewer. The result reveals an Edvard Munch very unlike the artist beloved by wide audiences. In addition to selecting the works to be shown from the museum depot, Knausgård designed a dramatic sequence that illuminates some of the more obscure regions of the artist’s inner world. “The exhibition takes the form of a journey from light and harmony through darkness and chaos returning finally to a controllable reality,” the Munch Museum, Oslo, where the show was on display in the summer of 2017, put it.

Karl Ove Knausgård was born in 1968. His novels have been translated into more than thirty languages and earned him numerous accolades. In 2015, Knausgård received the literary prize awarded by the German daily newspaper Die Welt, followed, in 2017, by the Jerusalem Prize for the Freedom of the Individual in Society and the Austrian State Prize for European Literature.

The exhibition is presented by the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein Westfalen, Düsseldorf, in cooperation with the Munch Museum, Oslo.

A book by Karl Ove Knausgård on Edvard Munch has been published in English translation as So Much Longing in So Little Space: The Art of Edvard Munch. The German translation will be released by Luchterhand Verlag in conjunction with the exhibition.

Curators: Karl Ove Knausgård, Susanne Gaensheimer, Anette Kruszynski

Opening: 11 October 2019, 19.00 in K20, under the presence of HRH Crown Princess Mette-Marit and Minister President Armin Laschet

www.kunstsammlung.de