Edvard Munch’s Expressionist Revolution at the Candiani Cultural Center
- Redazione
- Oct 29
- 2 min read
From October 30, 2025, to March 1, 2026, the Candiani Cultural Center in Mestre presents MUNCH. The Expressionist Revolution, a major exhibition curated by Elisabetta Barisoni and organized by the Fondazione Musei Civici di Venezia.
The project takes Edvard Munch as a starting point to explore the legacy of Expressionism and its explosive power — a force that has traversed more than a century of art history and continues to shape contemporary sensibility.
“I will no longer paint interiors with men reading and women sewing. I will paint living people who breathe, feel, suffer, and love.”
This famous statement by Munch encapsulates his pictorial revolution: an expressive urgency that breaks the boundaries between art and life, opening the way to a representation of the human being in all their fragility and existential tension.
The exhibition, exceptionally hosted on the third floor of the Candiani Center, originates from a precious nucleus preserved at the Galleria Internazionale d’Arte Moderna at Ca’ Pesaro — four graphic works by Munch (Anguish, The Urn, The Girl and Death, Ashes) — and unfolds through seven thematic sections. The itinerary places the Norwegian artist in dialogue with the movements that preceded and followed him: from Symbolism to Post-Impressionism, and from there to the Secessions of Munich, Vienna, and Berlin, where Munch became a central figure.
The Berlin Secession, founded in 1898, found one of its key sparks in Munch himself. His 1892 exhibition was violently attacked by traditionalist critics, provoking an irreversible rift that would pave the way for the avant-gardes. Alongside Munch, the exhibition presents works by Franz von Stuck, Max Klinger, Max Liebermann, Albin Egger-Lienz, as well as Italian artists such as Arturo and Alberto Martini, interpreters of a visionary and unsettling Symbolism.
The exhibition continues with a dialogue between the Norwegian master and the leading figures of European Symbolism — from Odilon Redon to Arnold Böcklin, from Félicien Rops to James Ensor — together with Italian artists like Adolfo Wildt, Cesare Laurenti, and Ugo Valeri, who reinterpreted those languages in dramatic and dreamlike ways.
A significant section is devoted to Munch’s legacy in German Expressionist printmaking, from the Die Brücke group with Erich Heckel to the next generation of Otto Dix and Max Beckmann, who translated the traumas of the twentieth century into raw, incisive imagery.
In the final section, The Contemporary Scream, the exhibition reaches the present day: from Renato Guttuso and Zoran Mušič, who bear witness to the violence of history, to Emilio Vedova, Ennio Finzi, Mike Nelson, Tony Oursler, Marina Abramović, and Shirin Neshat, all interpreters of a pain that still runs through humanity.
MUNCH. The Expressionist Revolution is thus a journey through the genealogy of modern unease — but also a reflection on the enduring vitality of Munch’s language. As curator Barisoni writes, “Munch’s scream has never been silenced: it is a sound that still resonates in the folds of the present, reminding us that art, to remain alive, must continue both to wound and to heal.”
Centro Culturale Candiani
P.le Luigi Candiani 30174, Venezia - Mestre
Date 30 ottobre - 1 marzo 2026