Paint it red: three Belgian greats at KMSKA in ‘Zingend Rood’
The Royal Museum of Fine Arts in Antwerp (KMSKA) sets the tone for an exhibition exploring the works of three giants in Belgian art history.
James Ensor, Rik Wouters and Jules Schmalzigaug are the centrepieces of the exhibition “Zingend Rood” (A Red that Sings) at the KMSKA in a display in which “colour vibrates, moves and becomes a sensory force”.
The exhibition takes you back to the Modernism of the turn of the 20th Century and explicitly explores synaesthesia – experiencing colour as sound --, most notably in relation to celebrated composer Claude Debussy.
The title of the exhibition comes from a letter Schmalzigaug wrote to his Italian colleague Umberto Boccioni in which he exclaimed never to have seen such a “red that sings” as in Peter Paul Rubens’ painting The Adoration of the Kings. That Rubens red opens the exhibition, with The Holy Family with the Parrot, to lure you into the magical red world of the finest Belgian Modernists.
“In A Red that Sings, colour and line merge into an almost musical experience,” promises curator Adriaan Gonissen. More information and tickets can be found on KMSKA’s website.