Metal studies

James And Me

Over the past few months, Arne Quinze has been working on new works inspired by Belgian painter James Ensor. The study series 'James And Me' explores the impressive work of this pioneering artist and aims to blend elements of his unconventional vision into new sculptures. After many paper models, Arne decided to make scale models in aluminium, which will even give a better forecast on the final result. Watch him deforming, bending and reshaping the material.

James Ensor

With the painting 'Entry of Christ into Brussels', Ensor wipes the floor with the conventions of civil, religious and political Belgian festivities. Going against the traditional invocations of a united future and memories of a glorious past, in this painting he rails against the sedate prosperity of Leopold II's Belgium. Blaring in contrast to the sedate order of conventional salon painting, ambiguous in perspective and composition rather than unambiguous, extravagant in technique and iconography rather than restrained and predictable, and lacking in definite meaning, 'The Entry of Christ into Brussels' in 1889 broke with the rules of taste, narrative and painting technique that applied in Belgium in the 1880s. Even in 1888, the year in which Paul Gauguin, Vincent van Gogh and Paul Cézanne set out on the road to radical artistic renewal, 'The Entry of Christ' stands out as one of the most exceptional and prophetic works of art produced in all of Europe that year. James Sidney Edouard Ensor was twenty-eight years old when he made his bold painting. Born in 1860 to a Flemish mother and an English father raised in Belgium, he had lived most of his life in his native Ostend, which by 1880 had a population of around sixteen thousand.