Munch Museum
You begin in Bjørvika at MUNCH, as the Munch Museum has been branded since 2020. It is devoted to the life and work of Edvard Munch, and since 2021 it has lived in this new building. Before that it sat at Tøyen, the site chosen for it back in 1951.
Munch himself took part in early talks about a museum during his lifetime, but it only opened in 1963, a hundred years after his birth. What fills it is his bequest to the municipality of Oslo, one of the world's largest collections of works by a single artist: almost 28,000 artworks and more than 42,000 museum objects. Three more private gifts sit alongside it, the collections of Rolf Stenersen, Amaldus Nielsen and Ludvig O. Ravensberg, together spanning almost a century of art history. In 2025, 775,000 visitors came through the doors.
Inside, five collection exhibitions run at any time, so you see Munch across his whole range rather than a handful of famous canvases. Look closely at the surfaces: he used materials in untraditional ways and experimented with technique, which gives his pictures their unique look and gives the museum's conservators a constant puzzle. Six or seven temporary shows a year bring in modern and contemporary artists other than Munch, plus music, talks and performances.
Is it worth the ticket? If Munch is part of why you came to Oslo, yes: give it a good hour or two before you set off. If you mainly want to stand in front of the first version of The Scream, that one belongs to the National Museum later on this walk, and you could save your museum time for it. From here it's 1740 m, about 24 minutes, to Akershus Fortress, and on the way you pass the Resistance Museum.
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