Two artists, two generations and one shared question: how can you make visible what happens inside a person? For the first time, Kunsthaus Zürich places the work of Maria Lassnig and Edvard Munch in direct dialogue – revealing striking connections between them.
Some pictures show us what we see. Others try to show what cannot actually be seen. Fear. Loneliness. Desire. Pain. The sensation of inhabiting a body. The unsettling experience of that body ageing. The closeness of another person, which can feel like comfort one moment and confinement the next. Perhaps even the simple yet difficult certainty of being here at all. Edvard Munch and Maria Lassnig found entirely different visual languages for these experiences. More than half a century separates the Norwegian, born in 1863, from the Austrian artist, born in Carinthia in 1919. Different generations, different worlds, different circumstances. Yet when their works are placed side by side, they can feel like two distant answers to the same question.
That is precisely what makes “Maria Lassnig and Edvard Munch. Painting Flow = Life Flow”, opening at Kunsthaus Zürich on 2 October, so compelling. For the first time, works by the two artists are brought into direct dialogue in a single exhibition. Around 150 works trace connections between two positions that, in art-historical terms, may initially seem far apart – yet come remarkably close when the focus shifts to perception, emotion and our relationship with our own bodies.
What remains when the visible is not enough?
Munch was never interested only in what lay before his eyes. What mattered was what an experience left behind in a person: memory, sensation, fear, desire, loss. The visible became the starting point for something internal. That is why, in Munch, the entire world can appear psychologically charged. A sky is never just a sky. A landscape is more than a landscape. Lines begin to waver, spaces lose their certainty, colours carry moods beyond the figure. The figure stands apart from the world – yet that world itself already seems saturated with inner life.
Decades later, Maria Lassnig took a different route. She turned her gaze radically back towards her own body. Not towards what that body looked like from the outside, but towards how it felt from within. Lassnig coined the term body awareness for this approach. What mattered was which parts of her body she could actually feel: pressure, tension, weight, warmth, spatial extension – bodily sensations for which no visible image initially exists. She did not simply paint a body. She tried to translate the experience of inhabiting that body into paint. And suddenly it becomes clear why placing these two artists side by side works so well. Munch paints a world transformed by the psyche. Lassnig paints how the world feels from within the body.
Colour as a nervous system
One of the strongest connections appears where it might initially seem merely formal: in colour. For both artists, colour is far more than a compositional tool. Grief, love, loneliness, fear, joy and pain are not simply depicted. They enter the painting itself. For neither artist is colour decorative. It becomes the picture’s nervous system. In Munch, it spills into the surroundings. Emotion seems to spread until landscape, sky and figure all obey the same inner state. The external world can become a landscape of the psyche.
With Lassnig, colour stays closer to the body. Her figures can appear green, pink, blue, flesh-toned or almost disembodied. Not because she wants to render a person naturalistically, but because she is trying to make sensation visible. What is felt? What goes unnoticed? Where does the body begin, and where does it seem to dissolve? The result is unsettling in both. And at times uncomfortably close.
Alone with the self
Loneliness is one of Munch’s great themes. His figures can stand side by side and still remain impossibly far apart. Even love and desire do not guarantee closeness. In works such as The Kiss and Vampire, the line between surrender and loss, merging and threat, is strikingly thin. Lassnig’s loneliness is different.
For her, there is ultimately one place no person can share with another: the body itself. It can be touched, looked at, desired – but the sensation of inhabiting it remains radically subjective. That is what makes her self-portraits so powerful. Lassnig rejects the idea of depicting the female body as it is expected to look from the outside. What matters is how it is perceived from within. This also changes the question of beauty. Beauty is no longer the goal. Perhaps it is not even a relevant category.
The discomfort of intimacy
The comparison becomes particularly compelling when it turns to relationships. In Munch, closeness between people is often marked by a peculiar ambivalence. It promises security while already containing the possibility of loss. Love, sexuality, jealousy and fear are difficult to separate cleanly. With Lassnig, that tension becomes more physical and more combative. Her figures can assert themselves, draw boundaries, confront. The female body is not a passive object before the viewer. It possesses its own perception and, with it, its own authority.
Both artists explore intimacy, but from different directions. With Munch, the question is what another person does to our inner world. Lassnig turns the gaze back towards the self: what happens to our perception of our own body when it becomes the object of someone else’s gaze? Perhaps this is where one of the most compelling shifts between the generations emerges.
Illness, age and mortality
Illness and death also run through Munch’s life and work. His mother died when he was five; his sister Sophie followed a few years later. Loss and fear of death recur throughout his paintings. The Sick Child is among his most personal, yet also most universal, engagements with that experience. With Lassnig, the perspective shifts again. Especially in her late work, the ageing of her own body becomes impossible to overlook. Yet she meets it with more than vulnerability. There is resistance, irony and, at times, an almost grim humour.
That matters. Lassnig’s work would be misunderstood if it were read solely as a story of pain and physical limitation. She can be unsparing and very funny at the same time. The body may age, weaken and change – her gaze remains alert. Munch’s existential experience often spreads across his paintings like an atmosphere. Lassnig sometimes seems to face it head-on: all right, then. Let’s look at this now.
Painting Flow = Life Flow
The exhibition takes its title from Lassnig’s 1996 painting Painting Flow = Life Flow. And perhaps it explains better than any retrospective curatorial framework why these two artists can be considered together. For both, life and painting are difficult to separate. Not because every picture needs to be read autobiographically. That would be too simple. But because painting becomes, for each of them, a form of self-questioning. What do I feel? What do I remember? What does fear do to my perception? Where does my body end? What does closeness mean? What happens to a person when they lose, desire, age?
The exhibition does not claim that Lassnig and Munch are alike. Quite the opposite. It is precisely their differences that make the comparison productive. Munch was an important point of reference for Lassnig. Now the gaze works in the other direction too: anyone familiar with Lassnig’s radical exploration of bodily perception may find themselves seeing Munch differently afterwards. And that is the exhibition’s real strength. We know Munch. Or at least we think we do. The Scream has long been embedded in our collective visual memory. Maria Lassnig, too, is now regarded as one of the most important figures in 20th-century Austrian art. Yet familiarity can obscure our view just as effectively as ignorance.
In Zurich, we encounter them both afresh. Not simply the painter of anxiety and the painter of body awareness. Not two art-historical positions neatly placed side by side. But two artists who, at different moments in time, tried to do something almost impossible: to make visible what exists only inside a person. Perhaps that is why their paintings still affect us so directly. More than half a century of art history lies between Munch’s landscapes of the psyche and Lassnig’s bodily sensations – yet the distance from our own experience is remarkably small.
Maria Lassnig and Edvard Munch. Painting Flow = Life Flow
Kunsthaus Zürich
2 October 2026 to 21 February 2027
