Melgaard + Munch
The recently opened Melgaard+Munch exhibition kicks off an exciting collaboration between the Munch Museum and Snøhetta. It is the first out of six exhibitions in +Munch - an ambitious two-year exhibition series at the Museum. Each exhibition will explore the work of Edvard Munch side by side another grand artist. Bjarne Melgaard is first up and he will be followed by five other artists, consecutively Vincent van Gogh, Gustav Vigeland, Robert Mappelthorpe, Jasper Johns, and Asger Jorn. The exhibition series is a collaboration between the curatorial team at the Munch Museum and the cross disciplinary team at Snøhetta.
Melgaard+Munch includes many fields of expertise, and spans book design, exhibition design with wall texts, and color scheme. As this is the first show in the series, most of the main alterations to the museum was executed now, such as rebuilding the entire entrance area to the exhibition spaces.
We built a portal consisting of 20 walls with the title logo of the exhibition superimposed on colorful pattern from the book, perfectly aligned only from one vanishing point. On the structural side we painted the ceiling black to give extra focus to the walls and the art displayed on them. Adjustments were also made to the light walls to heighten the feeling of precision in the exhibition spaces.
The book was in large parts designed on the basis of a random script to decide what images to use for the particular pages before it was laid out in combination with a set of geometric shapes. From the start it was intended for the book to be designed as a stand-alone element. However, in the end, the mounting of the exhibition was very tightly knit to the book design. In many ways the exhibition became the catalog.
