AGI – About a hundred works, including one lithograph version of the famous Screamwill move from the Oslo museum to Milan for a major exhibition dedicated to the Norwegian painter Edvard Munch. Almost 40 years after the great retrospective of 1986, Palazzo Reale returns to host paintings, drawings and even short videos by an artist whose fame has grown greatly in recent decades.
“Just think about it Every day millions of people use the Scream emoticon – he said at a press conference at the residence of the Norwegian ambassador in Rome the president of Arthemisia, Iole Siena -. He’s now playing with the Mona Lisa!”. The gaze with which the curator Patricia Berman wants to describe the painter considered among the fathers of expressionism is rather that of a private Munch, with particular attention to the influence on his work of the Italian Renaissance and the trip he took to Italy. During that trip, he painted the tomb of his uncle, the historian Pter Andreas Munch, who is buried in the non-Catholic cemetery: it is one of the paintings that can be seen in the next Italian exhibition. The exhibition can be visited in Milan from September 14th to January 26th and on PBonaparte Palace in Rome from 18 February to 2 June 2025; as always when Arthemisia organizes, there will be an “immersive” space.
“It is completely different from Munch’s last international exhibition, the one which ended in January 2023 at the Musée d’Orsay in Paris – he explained the director of the Munch Museum in Oslo, Tone Hansen –. Italy has been and always will be an important point of reference for Norwegian artists, it was also for Munch. In Rome he saw the works of all the greats of the Renaissance, he particularly loved Michelangelo and painted in the non-Catholic cemetery”. In Florence, the young Munch created a copy of Raphael’s self-portrait: and one of the sections of the Italian exhibition will be dedicated to the Norwegian painter’s self-portraits.
The Oslo museum dedicated to Munch hosts 1,200 works, or approximately two thirds of his overall production. The variety of what it houses allows it to organize very different exhibitions, explained Hansen. “Each wants to explore new elements and adapts to the different spaces that are used. In Oslo at the moment there is an exhibition on her landscapes, but the one that will open in September in Milan will be more complex”. In Paris in just three months the exhibition ‘A poem of life, love and death’ was visited by 730 thousand people; the organizers hope for further success in Milan and Rome too.
