Kunsthaus Zürich opened "Maria Lassnig and Edvard Munch. Painting Flow = Life Flow" on 2 October 2026, the first exhibition to place the two artists in direct dialogue. Around 150 works trace the connections between two positions that art history has usually kept apart, and the show remains on view until 21 February 2027. The shared question at its centre is how painting can make visible what happens inside a person. Munch, the Norwegian born in 1863, turned the visible world into a psychologically charged space: skies waver, landscapes lose their certainty and colour carries feeling beyond the figure. Lassnig, the Austrian born in Carinthia in 1919, took a different route, turning her attention radically inward toward the body itself — not how it looks from outside, but how it feels from within. Lassnig called her approach body awareness, translating pressure, tension and warmth into paint rather than rendering the body naturalistically. For both artists, colour is far more than a compositional tool: in Munch it spills into the surroundings until landscape and figure obey the same inner state, while in Lassnig it stays close to the body, making sensation itself visible. The exhibition takes its title from Lassnig's 1996 painting "Painting Flow = Life Flow," and the curators argue that the comparison works precisely because the artists are not alike. Works come from lenders including the Munchmuseet in Oslo, the Fondation Maria Lassnig and the National Museum in Oslo. Themes run from loneliness and intimacy to illness, ageing and mortality, and Munch emerges as an important early point of reference for Lassnig — one that now, reversed, lets viewers see his work afresh.