The Experimental Self: Edvard Munch’s Photography

The Experimental Self: Edvard Munch’s Photography brings the photographic work of the master painter to NYC for its first showing in the U.S.

Internationally celebrated for his paintings, prints, and watercolors, Norwegian artist Edvard Munch (1863–1944) also took photographs. This exhibition of photographs and films by Edvard Munch emphasizes the artist’s experimentalism, examining his exploration of the camera as an expressive medium. By probing and exploiting the dynamics of “faulty” practice, such as distortion, blurred motion, eccentric camera angles, and other photographic “mistakes,” Munch photographed himself and his immediate environment in ways that rendered them poetic. In both still images and in his few forays with a hand-held moving-picture camera, Munch not only archived images, but invented them.

On loan from the Munch Museum in Oslo, Norway, the approximately 50 copy prints in the exhibition and the continuous screening of the DVD containing Munch’s films will be accompanied by contextualizing didactic panels. One will be historical and biographical, and the others will examine Munch’s photographic exploration. Similarly to the ways in which the artist invented techniques and approaches to painting and graphic art, Munch’s informal photography both honored the material before his lens and transmuted it into uncommon motifs. This exhibition includes Munch’s experimental portraiture of friends and family as well as his self-portraiture, including images from what he termed his “Fatal Destiny” portfolio, staged between 1902 and 1908. It will coincide with, and complement, the exhibition Edvard Munch: Between the Clock and the Bed, on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art - Met Breuer. It has been organized by the American-Scandinavian Foundation in partnership with The Munch Museum in Oslo, Norway.

Credit: Exhibition overview from museum website 

Image: Edvard Munch, Munch with a hat in profile, self-portrait, 1930. Courtesy of Munch Museum, Oslo