The gallery has announced details of its upcoming exhibition Edvard Munch. Masterpieces from Bergen on display from the 27th May.

A major group of works by Edvard Munch will be shown in the UK for the first time in a brand new display at the Courtauld Gallery from May. This new exhibition will bring together 18 seminal paintings by Munch from KODE Bergen Art Museum, Norway. It is the first time the paintings have been shown together as a group outside Scandinavia.

This collection was formed at the beginning of the 20th century by the Norwegian industrialist and philanthropist Rasmus Meyer (1858-1916), a passionate collector who knew Munch personally and who was one of the early champions of his work. Meyer was astute in acquiring major canvases that chart the development of Munch’s unique expressive style and mark him out as one of the most radical painters of the 20th century.

Edvard Munch. Masterpieces from Bergen will begin with  important early paintings from the 1880s when Munch was drawing on the legacy of Impressionism to create his own style.Highlights of the exhibition will include Morning (1884), which was painted when the artist was just twenty years old and helped to establish Munch’s name as a modern painter and was even exhibited at the Paris World Fair in 1889. Elsewhere, Munch’s large-scale canvas Summer Night (1889) is credited as being the painting with which Munch found his artistic voice.

This is the second exhibition in The Morgan Stanley Series of temporary exhibitions at The Courtauld. It will be shown in The Courtauld’s Denise Coates Exhibition Galleries, adjacent to The Courtauld’s world-renowned permanent collection of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist art, featuring many of the painters who were central to Munch’s development, including Gauguin, Toulouse-Lautrec and Van Gogh.

Edvard Munch. Masterpieces from Bergen will be on display from the 27th May until the 4th September.