This prestigious show featured a 19-channel video installation based on our adaptation of Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary. The show took over the entire 8-room collection and was the first time Edvard Munch’s paintings were featured alongside video work. An accompanying catalogue of the same name was produced for the show.

The set-up of the exhibition is a pseudo-chronology: not the lives of the artists but of the progress towards ever-increasing loneliness ending in death of the two figures, “Emma”, the creation of a recluse author who is rumored to have said: “Madame Bovary, c’est moi” and of “Edvard”, protagonist of the self-portraits and focalizer of the images of fantasy, imagining the attraction of women figures, in sometimes aggressive images, but also empathic with suffering girls and women. Both artists combined obsessions with certain topics - for Munch, the “femme fatale”, for example - with a relentlessly experimental attitude towards style that made them both unparalleled masters of modern art. Some critics have even considered Flaubert’s writing (proto-)postmodernist, and this for good reasons. And Munch, who never let go of figuration, nevertheless experimented with various modes of abstraction. For him, this was not the opposite of figuration but its rival or partner. To demonstrate this, we juxtaposed two paintings of the Death of Marat topic, which demonstrates his anxieties in relationships with women, while the style of the two is so different, especially in their dialogue with abstraction, that it is impressive to see how radical he could be.
On the basis of this show, Mieke and I installed the a 19-channel iteration of the project in London: Madame B: Explorations in Emotional Capitalism at the Lethaby Gallery, Central Saint Martins, UAL.

https://research.gold.ac.uk/id/eprint/21375