“We are more than the Scream”: inside the mega Munch museum in Oslo | Architecture
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How fitting that a building dedicated to the life and work of Edvard Munch makes you want to scream.
The tormented Norwegian artist’s £ 235million mega museum stands as a menacing gray tower on Oslo’s waterfront, towering atop like a military lookout post, surveying the fjord. It’s a scout’s dream for the Ultimate Villain Headquarters, an almost comically menacing structure, hunched over the pristine white iceberg of the city’s beloved opera house with rogue intuition. It may seem like an appropriate container for Munch’s tortured soul, whose shadow hangs over the city – but the anxiety-provoking effect was not entirely intentional.
âWe wanted to create a welcoming vertical symbol,â says Juan Herreros, the Spanish architect behind the 13-story complex. âMaybe it’s against the local trend towards modesty, but we felt the city needed a statement in a prominent place for this amazing artist. It creates a new vantage point where people can experience a different view of the landscape. “
More than a decade in the making and subject to intense political wrangling over its cost, form and location, the museum finally opened on Friday, one of the largest in the world dedicated to a single artist. It’s a mighty Munch mall, an imposing stack of 11 galleries connected by zigzag escalators, crowned with a rooftop restaurant and bar.
âForget everything you know about museums,â says its director, Stein Olav Henrichsen. “It’s totally different.”
The word museum was dropped to begin with. In an attempt to attract new audiences, who may be put off by the m word, it’s just MUNCH. Its hard-hitting all-caps logo is tilted 20 degrees backward to match the tilt of the tower, emblazoned on the façade with vibrant letters from an entire story. A promo video sets the tone focused on youth, featuring teens skateboarding towards the building, texting each other with screaming emojis, about to come out, not just looking at paintings. Henrichsen promises that a teeming program of events and shows “will bring this house to life from 10 am to 10 pm every day”.
There will be no shortage of visitors, thanks to the global Munch-mania. But the impending crowds seem to have dictated the design: the whole place seems to have been designed to handle the hordes as efficiently as possible. A functional foyer, with shop and café, leads through large glass doors to the rows of escalators and elevators, where visitors are routed between landings and into the galleries. It’s a relentlessly airport-like world of gray floors, gray walls, and gray ceilings, with glass balustrades, steel trim, and aluminum mesh cladding complementing the cold, clinical palette. Seats are placed at the end of those long landings, with monitors adding to the ambience of the departure lounge, but this isn’t a place you’d like to linger or wander aimlessly. It looks like a vertical art conveyor belt.
âI’m part of the generation that has consumed too many horizontal museums,â Herreros explains, âwhere there are more people walking around, not knowing where they are going, than actually looking at the paintings. Unlike those flowing, space-filled museums, he says, which are often more about spectacular architecture than content, “we wanted to make a curator’s paradise, where art is the protagonist.”
He succeeded in the sense that the galleries themselves are all neutral, rectangular, black-boxed spaces, designed with a range of different heights, without any architectural whimsy. âWe’re not like Zaha,â he said, referring to the late Zaha Hadid who designed galleries with inconvenient sloping walls, âkilling curators every dayâ.
The star of the exhibition is indeed not the building but Munch, whose 26,700 works now occupy four times the space of the previous museum from the 1960s in Tøyen, 2 km to the northeast. Five thematic exhibitions showcase the artist’s many facets, from a gallery of his monumental canvases (so large they had to be stretched through a hole in the side of the building), to a floor that focuses on his engravings on wood, complemented by a table where you can rub your own Munch relief. Another piece shows his first experiences with selfies, taken after acquiring a Kodak Brownie camera in 1902, including a striking photo of himself posing in a loincloth on the beach, brush in hand. hand.
Another escalator ride brings you to a temporary exhibition that combines the work of Tracey Emin with Munch on two floors (partly shown at the Royal Academy last year). They make surprisingly good bed-mates, indulging in misery in each other’s bed with their anguished and dirty webs. Emin’s dirty bed looks exactly like the kind of place Munch would have been at home, the rubbish of used handkerchiefs and tampons echoing his habit of leaving his paintings out in the forest to be covered in mud and dung. ‘birds.
Further windows to his home life are provided on a floor that recreates ghostly black scenes of his home and studio, displaying his brushes, palettes, and even the breathing equipment he used to relieve his long-standing lung problems. dated. You may need similar aids if you plan to visit the entire museum in one day. It’s a feat of endurance, but it creates a rich image of the artist. As Henrichsen says: âWe are more than the Scream. “
It’s the fate of that twisted, yawning face – now a global staple of Halloween costumes and emoji keyboards – that they mostly have to thank for their new home. One of The Scream’s paintings was stolen (and later recovered) from the Tøyen Museum in 2004, sparking debate over the need for a more fortified facility. Along with the increased security and air-conditioned galleries, a theatrical trick was used to accentuate the drama of Munch’s best-known work. The museum has three different versions of The Scream – painting, pencil and lithograph – hung in a dimly lit sanctuary on the seventh floor, but only one is still visible. The other two remain hidden behind black doors, each revealing themselves one hour at a time. The oldest and most famous version of the painting might belong to the National Museum (which will reopen in a new house across town next year), “But now we’re giving them a bit of competition”, explains Henrichsen. They certainly increase the bids of the gift shop. You can buy the tormented, trembling face on everything from tote bags and pens, to eyeglass cases, tins of paint and even a diamond-encrusted ring – yours for £ 17,800.
The Munch Marathon ends with an open-air rooftop terrace, flanked by a bar and penthouse restaurant (unfortunately not called Munchies), where the building leans down to take in the views of Bjørvika’s waterfront. The area has been transformed over the past two decades from a container port to the cultural heart of the city, with the Opera House, an amazing new library and now MUNCH, all flanked by the brash ‘barcode’ development of high-rise offices and hotels behind – which the museum tower was in part designed to compete with.
For a space meant to offer panoramic views, the rooftop terrace does a good job of blocking out the view, with its layers of thick steel and slanted glazing creating the feeling of being locked in, trapped in a drinking area. . Munch has never been immune to his torments, and neither will the visitor. âWithout anxiety or disease,â he wrote, âI am a ship without a rudder. I want to keep this suffering. He didn’t know how his trauma would last – and would end up being forged into an anxious 60-meter-tall aluminum and glass monolith.
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