The invention of the Contemporary

The exhibition MUNCH. The Expressionist Revolution at the Centro Culturale Candiani on Venice’s mainland marks the final chapter in a cycle of shows devoted to modern masters and masterpieces from the collections of Ca’ Pesaro, ahead of the venue’s transformation into the new civic museum, MUVEC, a future “House of the Contemporary.”

Curated by Elisabetta Barisoni, the exhibition functions as a symbolic passing of the torch, tracing artistic exchanges, affinities, and above all Edvard Munch’s enduring legacy across the twentieth century and into the present. Beginning with four graphic works by Munch in the Ca’ Pesaro collection, Anguish, The Urn, The Girl and Death, and Ashes, the show interweaves the currents that shaped the artist, Symbolism, Post-Impressionism, the Secessions, with those he would later inspire. Munch emerges as both introspective and participatory: solitary in his inquietude yet deeply embedded in the cultural ferment of his time, in dialogue with writers and artists such as Henrik Ibsen, whose plays he illustrated, and shaped by travels through Paris, Germany, Belgium, and Italy during Europe’s explosive fin de siècle season of the Salon des Refusés and the Secessionist movements. His impact reverberates far beyond The Scream of 1893, that cry born of the body which made art total and unguarded. After the Second World War, the tensions of Expressionism resurface in artists who bore witness to historical trauma: Renato Guttuso, Zoran Mušič, Ennio Finzi, Emilio Vedova, and later in the works of Mike Nelson, Brad Kahlhamer, Tony Oursler, Marina Abramović, and Shirin Neshat. The expressionist cry continues to mutate, but never falls silent. Munch belongs to his era and, unmistakably, to ours.