![]() ![]() ‘The iconic quality, which is Munch’s quality, is also something that is standing between him and us,’ says Knausgaard. ![]() In Towards the Forest, he aims, by resurrecting obscure works from the museum’s vast holdings, to find a fresh perspective on one of the most well-documented artists in the world. These international bestsellers have made him, again like Munch, the embodiment of tortured introspection. The author’s series of autobiographical novels, collectively titled My Struggle, deal in forensic detail with alcoholism, marital turmoil, mental health and ageing. Like Munch, Knausgaard is a Norwegian phenomenon: a creative and confessional spirit whose work has achieved international acclaim. Knausgaard’s features - wolfish eyes and a steel-grey beard - match the setting perfectly, although he also has a shy, fleeting smile and is impeccably polite. ![]() We’re sitting in the museum’s garden, drinking coffee under a graphite sky on a cold spring day the trees in the neighbouring botanical gardens are still skeletal. For while Edvard Munch withdrew from the world, Knausgaard gives freely of himself. ‘That would be impossible, he protected himself so much.’ As Knausgaard discusses Towards the Forest, the summer exhibition that he has curated for the Munch Museum in Oslo, the pleasures and perils of being unguarded are a recurring theme. ‘I could never have been in the same room as Munch,’ Karl Ove Knausgaard tells me as he lights a cigarette. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |