The Edvard Munch Winter Studio at Ekely, Oslo, Norway: Studio residency

Residency at Edvard Munch’s Winter Studio, Ekely, Oslo 

In March 2026, Eamon O’Kane will undertake a month-long residency at Edvard Munch’s Winter Studio at Ekely, on the outskirts of Oslo. Situated within the grounds where Munch lived and worked for the last three decades of his life, the studio provides a rare and intimate setting in which to engage with the spirit and material legacy of one of modern art’s most psychologically complex painters.

For O’Kane, whose practice often explores the intersections between architecture, memory, and creative process, the residency at Ekely represents both a continuation and an expansion of his long-term engagement with artists’ working environments. His previous investigations into the studios and homes of figures such as Le Corbusier, Eileen Gray, and Per Kirkeby have been grounded in a fascination with how physical spaces embody artistic thinking. At Munch’s studio, O’Kane will extend this inquiry by responding to a space charged with emotional and historical resonance, a site where solitude, repetition, and observation of nature were central to artistic production.

Throughout the residency, O’Kane will produce new paintings, drawings, and digital works that reflect on the dialogue between interior and exterior worlds, between the introspective space of the studio and the surrounding winter landscape of Ekely. Working in the same light and seasonal atmosphere that shaped many of Munch’s late works, O’Kane will explore themes of time, decay, regeneration, and the cyclical nature of artistic labour.

The project will also consider the idea of the studio as a threshold, a place where memory and imagination coexist, where traces of the past persist in the present. O’Kane’s engagement with Munch’s working environment will not take the form of imitation, but of resonance: an exploration of how one artist’s space can trigger another’s reflections on solitude, perception, and transformation.

The residency at Ekely will culminate in a series of works that weave together painting, architectural reflection, and archival research, forming a dialogue between two Nordic-based artists separated by a century yet united by an enduring interest in how emotion, nature, and structure shape the act of creation.