Dear members and friends,
We are delighted to invite you for a private, guided visit to Léon Spilliaert at the RA at the Royal Academy in February 2020. Details will follow shortly.
From his celebrated self-portraits to dreamlike scenes of the North Sea coast, this exhibition will introduce UK audiences to the visionary work of artist Léon Spilliaert.
Léon Spilliaert (1881–1946) was born in the coastal town of Ostend. He moved to Brussels at the age of 20, and would live and work between the two cities for the rest of his life. Self-taught, he forged his own artistic identity, which was shaped by the affinity he felt with writers and thinkers such as Edgar Allan Poe and Friedrich Nietzsche.
Spilliaert’s work is characterised by dramatic perspectives and a quiet luminescence. He is best known for a sequence of enigmatic self-portraits and for his atmospheric night-time scenes of Ostend. His visual explorations of the self and potent images of solitude align him with European modernists such as Edvard Munch and Vilhelm Hammershøi.
Places are limited and will be allocated on a first-come-first-served basis, so do register as soon as possible.
The VCL Committee
