Edvard Munch's studios

Edvard Munch’s Studios in Oslo: The Quiet Power of Ekely

SEO title: Edvard Munch’s Studios in Oslo – Ekely, the Winter Studio and the Artist’s Last Creative Landscape
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Hidden among trees in Oslo’s Ullern district, Edvard Munch’s former estate at Ekely is one of the city’s most evocative cultural sites — not a conventional museum, but a living landscape of memory, work and artistic solitude. Here, in his garden, outdoor studios and preserved Winter Studio, Munch created some of the most powerful works of his late career. Today, Ekely remains a rare place in Oslo where art history has not simply been preserved, but allowed to breathe.

A place apart in the city

To understand Edvard Munch in Oslo, one must leave the monumental museum building in Bjørvika for a quieter address: Jarlsborgveien 14, a green and discreet corner of Ullern, northwest of Skøyen. This was Ekely, the property Munch bought in 1916, when he was 53 years old and already an internationally recognised artist. After years of movement, illness, travel and restless self-examination, Ekely became something radically different: a permanent home.

The property had previously been a nursery garden, with fruit trees, outbuildings, a Swiss-style main house, servants’ quarters and stables. For Munch, it became a private working kingdom — large enough for experiment, secluded enough for concentration, and close enough to the city to remain part of Oslo’s cultural geography. He lived and worked here for the final 28 years of his life, until his death in 1944.

The Winter Studio

The heart of Ekely today is Munch’s Winter Studio, the only building from Munch’s own time on the property that still remains. It was first built in brick in 1919–20, designed by architect Arnstein Arneberg, and later expanded in 1929 according to drawings by Munch’s friend, architect Henrik Bull.

The building was practical, but never merely functional. It gave Munch the space, height and light he needed to work through Oslo’s long winters, when painting outdoors became impossible. Inside, the studio offered the conditions for large canvases, ambitious compositions and the continual reworking that characterised his late production. It was not a romantic garret, but a serious workshop: robust, spacious, northern, made for labour.

Today, the Winter Studio contains two studio spaces and a graphic workshop, used year-round by professional visual artists. This is one of the most important things about Ekely: it is not frozen into a sentimental past. It continues to function as a working artistic environment.

Outdoor studios and the art of weather

Munch did not confine himself to interiors. At Ekely he also built several outdoor studios, simple structures that allowed him to work in direct contact with the surrounding garden and landscape. This mattered profoundly. The late Munch is a painter of seasons, bodies, trees, fields, workers, snow, rot, sun, harvest and ageing. Ekely gave him all of this within reach of his easel.

The garden, the orchard, the nearby woods and the shifting Oslo light entered his paintings with increasing force. His late works often feel less like controlled studio images than encounters with the elements: wind, glare, mud, cold, flowering branches, bare trunks, human figures absorbed into nature. At Ekely, Munch did not retreat from the world; he intensified it.

The studio as a self-portrait

Munch’s studios at Ekely can almost be read as an extension of the artist himself. They reveal the contradiction at the centre of his late life: seclusion and productivity, withdrawal and ambition, fragility and monumental scale. He was often imagined as a solitary figure, yet the work produced here was anything but small or private in vision.

At Ekely, Munch painted himself ageing. He painted the garden changing. He painted workers and animals, fruit trees and winter fields, interiors and thresholds. He explored the relationship between the human body and the natural world with a freedom that can feel startlingly modern. The studio was not simply a room where pictures were made; it was a stage on which Munch examined time itself.

After Munch

Following Munch’s death, his vast artistic legacy was catalogued and stored in the Winter Studio before being transferred to the purpose-built Munch Museum at Tøyen, which opened in 1963. The City of Oslo had purchased the Ekely property from Munch’s heirs in 1946, while the Swiss-style villa where Munch had lived was later demolished in 1960.

The loss of the main house remains one of the more painful episodes in Oslo’s cultural heritage. Yet the survival of the Winter Studio gives Ekely an extraordinary authenticity. It is a rare physical remnant of Munch’s working life — a building that still carries the scale, silence and atmosphere of his final decades.

Ekely as an artist colony

In the 1950s, Ekely was transformed into an artist colony, with 44 live-work units for artists designed by the Norwegian modernist architects Jens and Wenche Selmer. This continuation is deeply fitting. Munch’s estate did not become a polished monument cut off from artistic life; it became a place where new artists could live, work and develop their practice.

Today, Stiftelsen Edvard Munchs Atelier manages the site as a creative space for artists and the public. The studios are rarely open on ordinary days, but Ekely hosts open studios, talks and events during the year. The garden and outdoor areas, however, can be visited, offering a more informal encounter with the place where Munch once stood at his easel.

Visiting Ekely today

Ekely is not a conventional attraction with permanent exhibition rooms and daily guided tours. Its power lies in its restraint. Visitors come for the atmosphere: the garden, the surviving studio building, the sense of an artist’s landscape still quietly present inside modern Oslo.

Address: Jarlsborgveien 14, 0377 Oslo
Public transport: MUNCH lists bus 23 to Montebelloveien, bus 24 to Jarlsborgveien, tram 13 to Hoff and metro line 2 to Smestad as options for reaching the site.

For the most complete Munch experience, Ekely should be paired with a visit to MUNCH in Bjørvika, which holds one of the world’s largest collections of works by a single artist, including almost 28,000 artworks and more than 42,000 unique museum objects.

Why Ekely matters

Ekely is essential because it shows Munch not as a myth, but as a working artist. It brings him down from the iconography of The Scream and back into the physical world: the studio door, the garden path, the cold light, the practical need for space, the repeated return to canvas.

In Oslo, many places tell the story of Munch: the museum in Bjørvika, the National Museum, the Aula at the University of Oslo, Ekeberg, Grünerløkka, the fjord. But Ekely tells a different story. It is not only about the paintings the world knows. It is about the conditions that made late Munch possible — solitude, land, architecture, weather, repetition and time.

The living silence of Ekely

There are cultural places that impress through scale, spectacle and crowds. Ekely does the opposite. It asks the visitor to slow down. To look at trees. To notice the relationship between a studio wall and a winter sky. To imagine an elderly Munch moving between house, garden and atelier, still working, still searching, still refusing to let the visible world settle into comfort.

Edvard Munch’s studios in Oslo are not simply relics of a great artist. They are reminders of how art is made: in rooms, in seasons, in persistence, in doubt, in a daily confrontation with light. At Ekely, the drama is quiet — but it is profound.