‘Masquerade, Make-Up & Ensor’, a new exhibition at MoMu in Antwerp, examines the correlation between James Ensor and contemporary creative figures. A founding member of the avant-garde group Les XX, Ensor is championed as one of Belgium’s great proto-modernist artists.
Throughout his practice, ‘the mask’ was a recurring motif, often referencing the make-up trends of the late 18th and early 19th centuries. As art historian Susan M Canning observes of the painter and printmaker’s work, ‘masking, make-up and arrangements of masks […] promote the disruptive and transgressive subterfuge of artifice’.
