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No more interiors should be painted.

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No people reading.

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No women knitting.

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It should be living people, breathing.

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Simply life as a whole,

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writes Edvard Munch.

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I look for the rawness.

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For life.

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I believe that, once I have progressed further,

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I want to give my paintings a greater life force,

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writes Paula Modersohn-Becker.

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But what is life?

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What does it mean, especially in a time
when everything is changing?

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This question connects Paula Modersohn-Becker
and Edvard Munch,

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despite different life paths
and different artistic styles.

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Around 1900, Europe is in full upheaval.

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Industrialization, urban growth, and new technologies

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have radically changed everyday life.

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“Life” becomes a key word.

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A longing for truth and meaning.

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Paula Modersohn-Becker was born 150 years ago,
in 1876, in Dresden.

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She grows up there and later lives in Bremen and Worpswede,

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becoming one of the most independent artists
of early Modernism.

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Shaped by her stays in Paris,

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she opens herself to the avant-gardes of her time,

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but always stays engaged

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with the big questions of life.

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And in Worpswede she is drawn to a life close to nature,

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far from Western urban civilization
and overstimulation.

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She searches for radically new ways of showing things,

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struggles for a direct, simple view of people,

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and puts the inner, the essential, before the pleasing.

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Her paintings of mothers and children, of bodies,

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faces, and still lifes are neither idealized
nor sentimental.

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They show closeness and vulnerability,

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as well as inner calm
and an intense presence.

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Edvard Munch was born in 1863 in Norway,

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and from early childhood he faced illness
and death.

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His many personal experiences
deeply shaped his images

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and became fully tangible in his work.

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For Munch, art becomes a way to confront life:

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the relationship between the sexes,

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and other existential themes like fear,

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love, desire, and loss.

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But whoever speaks of life also thinks of death,

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not only as a simple end,
but as a condition of life itself.

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Both bodies of work turn, almost relentlessly,
to the question

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of what life means in its most basic form.

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When Paula Modersohn-Becker dies in 1907,
only a few days after the birth of her daughter,

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unexpectedly at the age of 31,

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she is at the height of her artistic work.

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Beginning and end, becoming and passing away,
meet intensely in her paintings

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and in her life story.

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Her work today feels like a constant search
for the core of human existence.

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The exhibition at the Albertinum,
“Paula Modersohn-Becker and Edvard Munch:

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The Big Questions of Life,” brings the works
of both artists into direct dialogue for the first time.

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It shows why their works touch each other,
contradict each other, and complement each other,

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and why their questions still echo today.

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Because the big questions of life remain,

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and their art reminds us that
love and pain, death and birth,

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that is life as a whole, are inseparably linked.