Anxiety

A crowd of pale, hollow-eyed figures presses forward along a bridge beneath a sky streaked with lurid red and yellow, their masklike faces staring out blankly, frozen in collective dread. Munch reuses the swirling setting of his Scream, but replaces the single howling figure with a procession of the anxious and despairing. Now in the Munch Museum in Oslo, Anxiety extends his Frieze of Life into shared, social dread - not one soul's terror but a whole stream of humanity locked in fear, their grim faces advancing endlessly under a burning, ominous sky.