TAKE MY SHADOW GIVE ME LOVE

Bodies Between Worlds – On the Dialogue of Edvard Munch and Richard Stipl

The encounter between Edvard Munch and Richard Stipl proposed by the exhibition Take My Shadow Give Me Love at Steinhauser Gallery is grounded in a shared understanding of the human figure as a site where existential tension, emotional intensity, and symbolic resonance converge. Although separated by more than a century, what links the Norwegian modernist and the contemporary Czech artist is not influence in a linear sense, but a deeper attunement to the past as a living reservoir: a realm of images, gestures, and metaphors through which the crises and aspirations of the present can be articulated.

While Munch’s work has long been interpreted through psychological expressionism, the exhibition also touches on a broader cultural lineage in which pre-modern and Gothic aesthetics – marked by emotional intensity and stark depictions of love, suffering, and mortality – open up additional possibilities for interpreting his imagery and its existential concerns. This framework highlights compelling parallels with Stipl’s artistic practice, in which the fragmented, obscured, and ritualized human figure becomes a threshold between the material and the immaterial, the temporal and the timeless.

Although Edvard Munch (1863-1944) is often interpreted through the lens modern psychology, trauma, and Symbolist introspection, his position in art history is also tied to an intensified artistic interest at the turn of the century in the emotional power of medieval imagery as a counterbalance to the rationality of the industrial age. Raised in Kristiania (Oslo) in a family marked by illness, early losses, and Lutheran austerity, Munch developed a visual language in which love, death, desire, anxiety, and metaphysical longing became inseparable from the materiality of the image. His works demonstrate not only autobiographical urgency, but also a modern reactivation of medieval forms. 

One way to understand Munch’s significance is to see how he connects Gothic intensity with modern subjectivity, turning sacred motifs into existential allegories. The Munch works presented in the exhibition represent a distinct facet of his artistic universe, shaped by recurring concerns with memory, mortality, and cosmology. 

Childhood Memory (1892) is an intimate reflection on the loneliness and emotional wounds shaped by the early deaths of Munch’s mother and his sister. A woman and a child move down a street toward a distant church tower, their faces turned away or obscured. The work’s graphic quality renders the scene fragile, almost disintegrating. The figures’ facelessness functions not as anonymity but as universality: grief becomes an archetypal human condition. Munch transforms personal trauma into a modern memento of vulnerability, embedding loss within the visual language of everyday life.

Self-Portrait (1895) presents Munch’s face and upper torso emerging from a deep black ground, reducing the image to a stark confrontation with the self. Without symbolic attributes, the portrait the image stages an encounter with the artist’s own presence through radical simplicity. The illuminated face, isolated against the surrounding darkness, conveys a quiet sense of vulnerability and existential uncertainty. Here, Munch turns the traditional self-portrait into a stripped-down psychological space, where the self appears suspended between presence and disappearance.

Tree of Life (1910) expands this intimate register into a cosmic one. The motif, which carries resonances from theology and mythology, becomes a grand allegory of “the modern life of the soul”. Innocence, passion, love, jealousy, despair, and death intertwine in a branching continuum, the central organic form expresses existential and emotional cycles. Its roots in mystical cosmologies underline Munch’s attraction to archaic symbols and mythic frameworks as means of expressing inner states, yet his treatment is unmistakably modern: the tree becomes not an emblem of eternal order but a fragile, trembling structure marked by emotional instability.

Richard Stipl’s artistic language enters the dialogue through a shared orientation toward the body as a symbolic carrier of existential states. His works become sites where materiality and mysticism, fragility and transcendence, embodiment and allegory fold into one another. The figures in Stipl’s recent works draw on the visual language and techniques of medieval image-making, which he transforms from historical reference into contemporary conceptual structure. The Gothic offers a framework for him, in which human experience is not illustrated but ritualized. This art-historical inheritance is visible in how Stipl handles the fragmented, wounded, or marked bodies, treating them as sites where material presence, symbolic meaning, and the intertwined legacies of the sacred and the profane converge.

Take My Shadow Give Me Love, the work that lends its title to the exhibition, exemplifies Stipl’s interest in placing different visual traditions in tension with one another. Conceived as a two-sided object that merges sculpture and painting, the piece presents on one face a carved diptych of reliefs that echoes the stylised, emblematic treatment of the human figure familiar from medieval art. On the reverse, Stipl turns to a different medium: darkly atmospheric landscapes that recall Romantic painting, complete with diminutive human figures overshadowed by the vastness of nature and the remnants of Gothic architecture. The juxtaposition of these two modes creates a dynamic in which human experience becomes both intimate and monumental. 

Finity unfolds as a constellation of relief panels in which built spaces, natural formations, and atmospheric motifs are placed in deliberate proximity. Stipl arranges stairways, cloud chambers, geological curves, and a fragmentary pair of eyes into a single composite field, allowing enclosed, human-made structures to meet the seemingly boundless expanses of sky- and landscape. One panel in particular – its tall, rhythmically rising tree trunks – echoes the way Munch approached the forest motif: as a mysterious, upward-striving architecture whose height and regularity suggested the interior of a cathedral. Here, too, the forest becomes less a natural scene than a spatial metaphor, a structure that invites contemplation of scale, depth, and the limits of perception. The partially rendered eyes introduce a trace of human presence, an observer held within the very constraints the work thematizes. In Finity, Stipl stages the tension between the immensity of the world and the narrow aperture of human understanding, suggesting that our attempts to grasp the totality of space remain necessarily fragmentary.

Across works such as Petit Mort and How Soon Is Now?  Stipl reactivates the structure of the altarpiece, a format historically charged with devotional intensity and existential drama, while infusing it with personal and contemporary layers of meaning. In Petit Mort the winged-altar configuration the traditional iconography of saints is replaced by skulls. The reclining female figure in the middle is accompanied by a dog that traditionally appears as a symbol of loyalty, and by the open window above her, which suggests a passage between life and death. The title, referencing the French expression for orgasm, subtly reframes the work as a meditation on passion, desire, surrender, and the proximity of pleasure and death. In How Soon Is Now?, wounded torsos flank a desolate landscape of mountains beneath a prophetic inscription. Neither heroic nor sentimental, the torsos reveal the body as a site of metaphysical vulnerability. The phrase appearing in the title and at the center of the work refers to the iconic song by the influential British band The Smiths. Rather than functioning as a direct quotation, the reference creates an atmosphere of temporal suspension and longing, in which resolution is endlessly deferred. 

The large-scale installation Vision unfolds as an expansive sculptural environment in which human bodies, fragmented limbs, animals, and hybrid forms are amassed into a quasi-ritual theatre. The installation brings together materiality and mysticism: carved wooden surfaces shift between hyperreal corporeality and symbolic abstraction, echoing both contemporary sculptural realism and the allegorical figuration of Gothic art. Within this crowded assemblage, the body becomes a site where sacred and profane registers collide. Echoes of religious statuary, martyrdom scenes, and bestiaries coexist with images of corporeal vulnerability, decay, and mundane exposure. Stipl stages multiple art-historical paradigms simultaneously: iconic medieval poses and modern sculptural naturalism appear side by side, dissolving chronological boundaries in a transhistorical vocabulary. The dramaturgy of this multi-figure composition produces what feels like a “super-narrative” of human existence, gathering physical and metaphysical dimensions within a single spatial field. This accumulation of bodily states – mortality, desire, exhaustion, devotion, suffering, resilience – suggests a structure reminiscent of Munch’s Tree of Life. 

If Munch brought the medieval into dialogue with modernism, Stipl pushes this dialogue into the digital era. His sculpture Algorithm presents a tattooed bust inscribed with both classical motifs and contemporary digital symbols: the logos of ChatGPT, TikTok, Tinder, the inscription “Artist is the Algorithm”. In this work, Stipl articulates a posthuman Gothic, where the sacred and the technological collide. The body becomes a palimpsest of different iconographies and the pressures of a digitized cultural economy, revealing that existential vulnerability persists, even when the forces shaping the self are shifting from metaphysical to algorithmic.

By bringing Edvard Munch and Richard Stipl together, the exhibition Take My Shadow Give Me Love reveals a shared horizon that transcends the artists’ historical differences. Both Munch and Stipl treat the body as a porous entity through which experiences of loss, desire, vulnerability, and transcendence take visible form. Both draw upon symbolic languages, yet transform them into contemporary expressions of existential uncertainty. The dialogue of the two artists confronts the finitude of human life not through abstraction or detachment but through images and forms that insist on emotional immediacy. 

Text : Zsófia Máté