In late-80s Germany, the painter Günther Förg, who died in 2013, became fascinated with the art of Edvard Munch. In the early 90s, when he met the Norwegian Munch specialist Per Bjarne Boym, Förg began to create his Grid Paintings, or “Glitterbilder.” The series was inspired not by Munch’s haunting images but by his treatment of surface, his use of color. In Förg’s work, scatty lines produce floating shapes in a Munch palette. The works are ominous, monumental, and reverberate with something familiar. —E.C.