EDVARD MUNCH IN DENMARK

ANDREA FOURCHY & SERGEJ JENSEN

June / August 2016

Prior to his stay at the clinic, Munch wrote he might, “perhaps try a prison for the finer class of criminal aristocrats, or what they call a nerve sanatorium”. It appears ultimately he had a good time.

In Munch’s personal photographs of himself and his nurses the compositions are similar to his paintings. Figures float through the middle frame nearly touching the margins of the images from head to toe. When he appears, always the largest, he places himself in the foreground cropped in from the bottom right. As in his seemingly infinite Melancholia series in which a cartoonish stand-in takes his place. In the photographs one has the sense that the nurses are humoring him. The functional objects of the clinic, the keys around a nurse’s belt, furniture propping up his paintings and tables set with glassware seem as fake as the fact that he was the patient being observed by his doctors and nurses. Not the other way around.

In their exhibition Edvard Munch in Denmark,  Andrea Fourchy and Sergej Jensen have made paintings and silkscreens using Munch’s psych pop imagery.