Ensor, rebel revolutionary
Beyond a deep interest in Impressionism, Ensor attempted to go beyond its limits, as evidenced by the powerful expressiveness of his colors and his pronounced taste for odd shapes. Giving free rein to his imagination, his visions and his fanciful dreams, he creates a grotesque iconography, terrifying and hilarious at the same time. The popular culture of the end of the 19th century also permeated Ensor and instilled in the artist the use of carnival masks through which he sought to reveal rather than conceal the masked characters.
KMSKA presents the exhibition “Ensor, fanciful dreams. Beyond impressionism”an ultimate tribute to the work of the rebel artist. Visitors will be able to immerse themselves in the largest retrospective devoted to James Ensor to date, immersed in the painter’s colorful universe, full of visions, masks and satire.
For the first time such a grandiose exhibition reveals so this modern master in his most satirical light, an aspect long underestimated. His world is marked by radical contrasts. He surprises with a work that aims to be comical, morbid, wild and refined at the same time. Rather than transgressing the existing rules of art, Ensor becomes the one who rewrites them.
“Never before has an exhibition been organized bringing together the key works of Ensor and those of other impressionists, yet it is precisely this international context which allows us to highlight the specific qualities of Ensor’s artistic production. ” explain Luk Lemmens, president of the Royal Museum of Fine Arts in Antwerp.
At the ModeMuseum (MoMu), we celebrate fashion painters: the know-how and inexhaustible creativity of makeup artists and hairdressers in a multimedia exhibition where light, color, art, fashion and makeup are told. Ensor’s ideas about masquerade, false coquetry, seduction, deception, the artificial and the ephemeral are reproduced today.
At the Plantin-Moretus Museum, you can look over the shoulder of Ensor who experimented extensively with etching techniques. He transformed the prints into unique works of art by manually coloring them with colored pencil, chalk or watercolor. This exhibition brings together for the first time the most remarkable results of these experiments and explains Ensor’s painstaking work in creating such engravings.
At FOMU (Foto Museum Antwerpen) the first major solo exhibition in Belgium by the American artist Cindy Sherman is revealed. With more than 100 works spanning the period from the 1970s to date, the exhibition traces the work of this leading contemporary artist. Like James Ensor, Cindy Sherman is renowned for her masquerades which invite us to take a critical look at social conventions.
