Munk sculpts and contours with oil paint alongside a palette of eyeshadow, highlighter, tinted lip gloss, and foundation. The painterly capture of an instant of beauty—fruits or clouds, and their imminent threat of decay or change—is thus mirrored by today’s omnipresent economy of “appearance” and its make-up: how we daily paint on a fresh face, creating a (faux) front.

Long before commercial stock image libraries, paintings of beautiful fruits or landmark fires circulated in European culture. Munk repeats these repetitions while blowing up the original motifs. Just as a word loses its meaning when said over and over, Munk’s repetition holds the potential to empty out the original motif. This seriality is especially evident in her silver-clad monochromes, each mirroring the silhouette of one of her still lifes, as its shiny echo.

As in the oversized scale of the advertising industry, Munk works on large canvases, focusing on a central figure—apples, smoke, or the silhouette of a fan—while she lets part of the original motif vanish, melting into air. A common denominator is this fleeting instant. The works in fact seem to evaporate as we watch them—a sentiment underscored by a subtle odor of powder room or damp, alluding to musty museum storage. In Munk’s paintings solidity is over; changing, aging, dissolution are imminent.

The exhibition is supported by: