Edvard Munch: Contemporary Dialogues
Edvard Munch - Street In Asgardstrand - 1901Andy Warhol - Madonna and Self-portrait after Munch
From 18 February to 19 June 2022, the Albertina Museum in Vienna presents "Edvard Munch: In Dialogue", an exhibition showing Munch's influence on contemporary art.
Images: Edvard Munch, "Street in Asgardstrand", 1901 ·· Madonna and Self-Portrait with Skeleton Arm (after Munch)
The expression “ahead of his time” applies to few artists with as much justice as it does to Edvard Munch (1863-1944). Although for much of the public it seems that Munch painted only one work of interest (the famous The Scream), the whole of his work is fascinating and complex, and shows us an innovative artist, an expressionist before expressionism, essential to understand modern painting. Or, as the Albertina Museum defines him, "the most modern artist of the modern age, not to say a contemporary artist of the modern age".
The exhibition includes some 60 works by the Norwegian artist, almost all of which belong to the later phases of the artist's career, together with works by contemporary artists who show to a greater or lesser extent Munch's influence. Andy Warhol (1928-1987), for example, used some of Munch's iconic images (such as his Madonna or The Scream) for his series of repetitions of the same object in variations of colour. More subtle is Munch's influence on artists such as the German Georg Baselitz (b.1938), whose Winter "dialogues" in the exhibition with Munch's Winter Landscape, or the British Tracey Emin (b.1963), whose works, according to the Albertina Museum in a press release, "are informed by traumatic personal experiences and tie in with the autobiographical nature of Munch's work".
"Edvard Munch: In Dialogue" is the third major exhibition that the Albertina has devoted to Edvard Munch in the last 20 years, following the 2003 retrospective -held shortly after the museum's restructuring- and the 2015 exhibition "Munch: Love, Death and Loneliness".

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