A denizen is a person, animal or plant that lives in a particular place or region. Photographer Andres Serrano, best known for causing outrage with taboo-breaking images, decided it was le mot juste to describe the homeless people of Brussels he was asked to photograph by the city’s fine arts museum.
Barbara Lewis
As if an extraordinary imagination for fantastic, unsettling monsters and a genius ahead of his time for sensitive, naturalistic depictions of ordinary people weren’t enough, Hieronymous Bosch also had a modern knack for successful branding.
Northern Ireland’s permanent representation in Brussels periodically brings to the capital of Europe a sample of Northern Irish culture in a spirit of cross-cultural exchange that risks being disrupted in the event of a Brexit.
An exhibition of the extraordinary output of France’s Henri Cartier-Bresson, hailed as the founder of photojournalism and “the eye of the century”. That is true in the fullest sense of the words, given his exceptional ability to see the telling detail, or, in his own words, to seize the fact related to “the deep reality”.
With their green goats, giant roosters and bridal couples flying through the air, Marc Chagall’s works appear fantastic, but he insisted he only painted direct reminiscences of his own life.
A trawl through an old school year book and the realisation of how many contemporaries had ended their own lives underlined for writer Pearse Elliott the truth that suicide is so prevalent it has acquired the force of the inevitable.
Faces Then focuses on the 16th-century, regarded as the golden age of the portrait, when it was the rich, the powerful and the burgeoning bourgeoisie who could afford to have their portraits taken. Faces Now confines itself to the period since 1990, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and, with it, the collapse of ideologies and artistic parameters.
Embracing art’s ability to transcend national divisions, a young pan-European ensemble delivered Tchaikovsky at his most triumphantly Russian, as part of a vivacious and compelling beginning to its new season, known as the Hulencourt Art Project, which runs until May next year.
What exactly is the essence of Belgium? Far harder to pin down than French chic or English sang-froid, the nation’s uneasy mix of Walloon and Flemish, surreal and down-to-earth, all miraculously held together, is perfectly encapsulated by the Atomium – a giant, futuristic structure on the northern edge of Brussels.
Romeo Castellucci at Brussels’ La Monnaie (De Munt in Dutch) opera house takes a real-life sufferer of locked-in syndrome and turns her into the protagonist of Ophee et Eurydice (adapted by Hector Berlioz from Gluck).
Noel Coward wrote of his musical Ace of Clubs that “the idea is to do it as simply as humanly possible”. For the first professional London revival since the original 1950 production, Southwark’s Union Theatre draws on its decade of experience of producing loveable, low-budget musicals and takes Coward at his word.
For British rock fans, 2016 is marked by the death of David Bowie. In the French-speaking world, it has further significance as the 25th anniversary of the fatal heart attack that ended Serge Gainsbourg’s career as a hell-raising provocateur whose lyrics prompted President Mitterrand to compare him to Baudelaire. To commemorate the poet of the French rock world, Brussels and Paris have both organised exhibitions of French photographer Pierre Terrasson’s portraits of Gainsbourg and of other major 1980s performers, including Bowie.
By Barbara Lewis • art, exhibitions, photography, year 2016 • Tags: art, Barbara Lewis, exhibitions, photography