Edvard Munch & Käthe Kollwitz

Munch and Kollwitz share an intensity, a concern with darkness, with grief, pain and loss. At the same time, they took markedly different approaches to aesthetics, to politics, to life. Munch is individualistic, concerned with existential questions and the psyche; Kollwitz was a socialist and a pacifist, and her art seeks the universal in the particular, offering archetypes of suffering and injustice.

Though Kollwitz was celebrated for her draughtsmanship and Munch for his oil painting, both artists are also considered masters of the craft of printing. This exhibition brings together lithographs, etchings and woodcuts that span the full range of both artists’ working lives and presents some of both artists’ best-known images. It also attempts offer a deeper and more complex picture of their shared themes and the connections between them, offering moments when each appears to work from the other’s perspective. Munch used lithography extensively and innovatively; Kollwitz was renowned for her ability to coax a depth and range of tone from her prints that made them as powerful as her original drawings.