How Tracey Emin is giving Munch the mother he never had

A lifelong fascination with the Norwegian creator of The Scream has been turned into 15 tonnes of bronze, soon to be installed at a new museum in Oslo

‘Munch’s mother died when he was very young,” says Tracey Emin. “So I want to give him a mother.” And what a mother she is giving him. The artist’s nine-metre bronze colossus will be unveiled in 2020, at the new Munch Museum in Oslo harbour. Emin has been fascinated by Edvard Munch’s brokenhearted art all her life. Now her giant Mother will be a permanent feature of the fjord he so famously depicted under a blood red sky in The Scream.

Yet this monumental image of a naked woman kneeling and hunched over an invisible child began as a small, fragile, handmade object. “It started off with me playing with clay,” says Emin, who didn’t think she had a chance when she entered the international competition to find a public artwork for Oslo’s Museum Island. Other candidates included the acclaimed Scandinavian artists Olafur Eliasson and Ragnar Kjartansson. But intimacy won.

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