That's because 2010 was the 150th anniversary of James Ensor's birth, and it's this show staged in both Ghent's Contemporary Arts Museum and across the street at its Museum of Fine Arts that perhaps brings that date into even more perspective than the rest.
Hareng Saur: Ensor and Contemporary Art shows Ensor's influence - both direct and indirect - on contemporary artists, focusing on the last decade. Even as a group show of contemporary art, this would be a stunner; combined with some of Ensor's most interesting works, it becomes the country's must-see winter show, powerfully illustrating that Ensor in his time was as shocking and provoking as what we expect from avant-garde artists today. The title of the show, in fact, comes from Ensor's 1891 painting "Squelettes se disputant un hareng saur" ("Skeletons Fighting Over A Smoked Herring"), in which he saw himself as the herring, torn apart by soulless critics.
The show is grouped into rooms by themes dear to Ensor's heart: death, masks, the grotesque, religion (or more particularly Jesus). Occasionally you'll get a direct tribute, such as Flemish artist Guillaume Bijl's large installation "Homage to James Ensor", a glass case containing a skeleton, topped by a disturbingly smiley mask, wooden shoes and rapiers.
Even more amusing is Flanders- born artist Emilio Lópze- Menchero's "Trying to Be James Ensor", in which he photographs himself dressed identically to the master's famous "Self Portrait With a Flowered Hat" (also to be found in the exhibition).
But Hareng Saur is not a tribute show, and most of the work is about influence, direct or otherwise. Some of Ensor's famous chalk-on- paper crowd scenes - including "Christ's Entry Into Jerusalem" and "The Cathedral" - are shown with works that depict similar crowds or even "close-ups". German painter Jonathan Meese's electrifying portraits (which could be of Jesus or of himself ) - great globs of black and red paint pushing up from the canvas, human hair held in place with a liberal smear of wax - would not be out of place were you to see them through a microscope held up to Ensor's drawings.
It's difficult not to see Ensor, meanwhile, in a new large-scale work by Austrian collective Gelitin, a photo collage making up a crowd of people, each manipulated in some way with clay - a monstrous nose here, oversized legs there. Like Ensor, its striking sense of dark humour is at once enchanting and nerve-wracking.
No show of contemporary avant- garde art would be complete without American Paul McCarthy, and he's duly shown here in video wearing a thick mask and boxing gloves, beating the hell out of himself. Across from him is one of American Cindy Sherman's series of History Portraits, her own profile in a photo, with a hint of Dutch Baroque - and a huge prosthetic nose.
Ensor refused to leave Ostend during either world war, and two video installations, including footage of the annual re-enactment of the Battle of Waterloo, question why a people would want to play out such atrocities again and again. Putting this into sharp perspective is German artist Thomas Hirschhorn's astonishing large-scale, mixed- media installation "Substitution 2 (The Unforgettable)", which mixes photographs of war victims - bodies torn asunder and heads half missing - with magazine cut-outs of soldiers and average people blown up to life-size, numbers perched jauntily on their heads like hats, references to the number of dead.
Staged in the beautiful rotunda of the Fine Arts Museum, the installation is surrounded on an upper balcony by Ensor's series of the seven deadly sins.
Hirschhorn's work is a visceral masterpiece but may take a back seat in terms of the talk-of-the- show, a designation that belongs to "Fear and Megalomania in Fifteen Different States" (pictured), a new work by Spanish artist Enrique Marty. Extraordinarily life- like men in business suits bring grotesque inner psyches to the outside, in much the same way Ensor did with a brush.
-5°C / 2°C
