James Ensor Recomposed
For the reopening of the James Ensor House in Ostend, Athos Burez was invited to translate Ensor’s The Baths of Ostend (1890) to the present day.
More than a hundred and fifty Ostenders and Ensor enthusiasts took part in a contemporary recomposition of the painting, surrounded by a series of works on Ensor’s other obsessions: death, masks, the sea and the faded glamour of the coast.
view the series →
More than a hundred and fifty Ostenders and Ensor enthusiasts took part in a contemporary recomposition of the painting, surrounded by a series of works on Ensor’s other obsessions: death, masks, the sea and the faded glamour of the coast.
view the series →
about the series
In 1890, James Ensor painted The Baths of Ostend, a sparkling, satirical scene of the bathers of his home town at the fin de siècle. Society was still prim and Victorian on land, but once in the water, for the brief time bathers spent there, almost anything seemed permitted. Ensor placed a priest closest to the leering crowd: the Church campaigned against sea bathing, yet in Ensor’s painting the clergyman is the greatest voyeur of all. It is this blend of humour and social critique – caricatural enough to provoke thought rather than simply offend – that Athos Burez admires in Ensor’s work.
A hundred and thirty years later, surprisingly little has changed. The beach is still a meeting place for every rank of society, where people come to see and be seen, and where everyone stands equally exposed in their swimwear. Commissioned by Visit Flanders and the city of Ostend, Burez went in search of today’s parallels: the cooler-box culture of the beach, the plastic pollution of the sea, and a society that is now far more diverse than the all-white crowd in Ensor’s painting.
Among the many characters in Ensor’s composition is a photographer standing on top of a bathing cabin, perhaps a nod to the photographs and postcards that captured Ostend’s bathers. In Burez’s version, he takes that place himself: an observer who, like Ensor, looks at the beach of Ostend with a critical eye and records a snapshot of society in his own time.
Like Ensor, Burez has a fondness for clichés and for the humour hidden in them. His images do not ridicule; they invite recognition, and the gentle confrontation of catching yourself in one. Alongside the recomposed Baths of Ostend, a series of photographs explores Ensor’s wider universe – masks, shells, flowers and still lifes – with the same mischievous wit Ensor used to overturn sacred cows.
A hundred and thirty years later, surprisingly little has changed. The beach is still a meeting place for every rank of society, where people come to see and be seen, and where everyone stands equally exposed in their swimwear. Commissioned by Visit Flanders and the city of Ostend, Burez went in search of today’s parallels: the cooler-box culture of the beach, the plastic pollution of the sea, and a society that is now far more diverse than the all-white crowd in Ensor’s painting.
Among the many characters in Ensor’s composition is a photographer standing on top of a bathing cabin, perhaps a nod to the photographs and postcards that captured Ostend’s bathers. In Burez’s version, he takes that place himself: an observer who, like Ensor, looks at the beach of Ostend with a critical eye and records a snapshot of society in his own time.
Like Ensor, Burez has a fondness for clichés and for the humour hidden in them. His images do not ridicule; they invite recognition, and the gentle confrontation of catching yourself in one. Alongside the recomposed Baths of Ostend, a series of photographs explores Ensor’s wider universe – masks, shells, flowers and still lifes – with the same mischievous wit Ensor used to overturn sacred cows.