Towards the Forest / Max Norman in Criticism

Last spring Towards the Forest: Knausgaard on Munch opened at the Munch Museum in Oslo. At first glance, the invitation to curate the exhibit seems proof of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s installation in the Norwegian pantheon, justified by his fame alone. But this is not one dour Nordic genius paying homage to his dour Nordic predecessor. Knausgaard is not obligated by the curator’s aspiration to historical comprehensiveness, and refrains from the didactic tone that has become the lingua franca of placards and audio guides. Collaborating with curator Kari J. Brandtzaeg to comb through more than one thousand paintings, eighteen thousand prints, nearly eight thousand drawings and watercolors, and fourteen sculptures from the Munch Museum collection, Knausgaard selected 143 rather obscure works from the artist’s oeuvre, some exhibited for the first time.

According to the traditional account, Munch’s style underwent a dramatic change following a self-described “nerve crisis” that landed him in a mental institution in 1908. The paintings of the 1890s—his most iconic images—gave way to a more extroverted, colorful style, in which the primary subject is not the self, but others, and the world. But for Knausgaard, the world is never absent from Munch’s work. One of the few gnomic texts that adorn the otherwise spare walls of the Munch Museum reads, “Art is just as much about searching as it is about creating. But if that is so, searching for what? For ways of entering reality, of entering into the world.” This, too, is what Knausgaard sets out to do in his writing, where he speaks of “opening the world.” ... [mehr] https://thepointmag.com/2017/criticism/towards-the-forest-knausgaard-munch-art-exhibit