Title: With eyes closed
Description: Gauguin's and Munch's artistic roots extend back to Realism and Impressionism, an era when artists were preoccupied with capturing reality as the eye saw it. Both these artists rejected such an approach and instead, in each their own way, helped bring about a new movement in art: Symbolism. This new style merged elements from visible reality with personal visions and fantasies, something that resulted in pictures whose meaning could be fairly enigmatic and open to interpretation. After having worked for several years with the medium of painting (and in Gauguin's case, sculpture as well), both artists began to appreciate and explore the endlessly creative possibilities that were inherent in printmaking - Gauguin in 1889 and Munch in 1894. They both transcended the genre's conventional limits to create ground-breaking prints where the technique underlined the fundamental aspects of the image in a way only a true master could execute. Yet the two differed markedly from each other in their style of printing. The greatest similarity is their inexhaustible interest in experimentation, as expressed most fully in their woodcut technique. Whereas Gauguin was more focused on details, however, Munch often reduced his images to their absolute minimum. Exhibition: Munch Museum, Oslo, Norway (12.02.-22.04.2018).
Subjects: Exhibitions
People: Paul Gauguin (1848-1903), Edvard Munch (1863-1944)