Munch’s Sun

The other week I was in Oslo and visited the Munch museum, taking a break from a marathon meeting schedule. Munch‘s museum holds the largest collection of his work (a long time ago in London E and I visited another large exhibit in the Tate Modern gallery). One temporary exhibition had colourful works by Katharina Grosse, who lived and worked for a few months in Munch’s old villa to make paintings. We previously enjoyed work by her in the Centre Pompidou in Metz, and in the Louis Vuitton pavilion in Paris. Grosse took some of her inspiration from a Munch painting of the sun, where it has a black dot in the middle. The sun was what caught my eye too, differently. First I came across a wood cut where the shape of the sun and its reflection on the water is highly stylised. Mystical shore, 1897 woodcut by Edvard Munch, public domain image The same sun and reflection appears in Edvard Munch’s paintings too. Separation, 1894 painting by Edvard Munch, public domain image Two women on the…