Edvard Munch self-portrait

The best art and exhibitions in May 2019—Munch and Murillo

Plus drawings at the Estorick
April 3, 2019
 Edvard Munch: Love and Angst, British Museum, 11th April to 21st July

Edvard Munch, below, was as radical a print-maker as he was a painter. It was his black-and-white lithograph of The Scream, created in 1895 after his own 1893 pastel version, which made him famous. One surviving copy will be a highlight of this show, a collaboration with the Munch Museum in Oslo, and the largest UK exhibition of Munch’s prints for 45 years. The show tracks his traumatic upbringing near Oslo, through revelatory journeys to Paris and Berlin, where tumultuous love affairs and a pre-war ferment of ideas fostered his powerfully expressive art.

Oscar Murillo: Violent Amnesia, Kettle’s Yard, 9th April to 23rd June

Born in Colombia and brought to London as a child, Oscar Murillo will fill the spaces of Kettle’s Yard in Cambridge with his migratory art. Paintings are layered on other paintings, with canvases absorbing the materials of their environments. Drawings transform into collages, performances and installations. Murillo’s primary focus, in this first major solo show since 2013, is our collective habit of forgetting. His creative energy, by contrast, defies loss.

Who’s Afraid of Drawing? Works on Paper from the Ramo Collection, Estorick, London, 17th April to 23rd June

Put together by the late Milanese entrepreneur Giuseppe “Pino” Rabolini, the Ramo Collection is the largest private collection of 20th-century Italian art on paper, comprising nearly 600 works. The Estorick has selected 60 sheets, reflecting key artistic movements between 1900 and the 1980s, by artists such as Giorgio de Chirico, Lucio Fontana, Pino Pascali and many more.  Whether the artists are primarily painters, sculptors or creators, these drawings are works of art in their own right.