Organized by the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts (VMFA) in partnership with the Munch Museum, Jasper Johns and Edvard Munch opens in Richmond on Saturday, November 12, 2016 and remains on view through February 20, 2017. The showing at VMFA is the sole U.S. venue, following the presentation at the Munch Museum, the sole venue abroad.
“The depth of the relationship between Johns and Munch has never been explored as systematically, nor illustrated as stunningly, as it will be in this international exchange,” says VMFA Director Alex Nyerges. Including more than 120 paintings, drawings, prints, and photographs, the exhibition has been conceived and organized by John B. Ravenal, Executive Director of deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum and former Sydney and Frances Lewis Family Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at VMFA.
Ravenal calls the two artists “strange bedfellows” in the accompanying volume, Jasper Johns and Edvard Munch: Inspiration and Transformation, co-published by the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts and Yale University Press, in partnership with the Munch Museum. By the turn of the last century, Munch had worked his way towards a figurative style shaped by the emotions that preoccupied him–anxiety, loneliness, jealousy, fear, and grief. Johns, on the other hand, has been quoted as saying “I didn’t want my work to be an exposure of my feelings,” when describing why he turned his back on Abstract Expressionism to paint familiar, even neutral, images like flags, targets, and numbers.
Learn more about the forthcoming exhibition here.
