In the Chamber of Horrors

A skeleton has made itself comfortable in a brightly lit attic decorated with a colourful array of East Asian wall hangings. Sunk in a cosy armchair, it has engrossed itself in an illustrated concertinastyle book.

Painter James Ensor particularly delighted in baffling the viewer with weird and wonderful images such as this. By a sarcastic interplay of seemingly friendly and familiar ambiences, with visual motifs that nonetheless raise a sense of fear in us, this Belgian painter created bewilderment: might there perhaps be an unknown world that exists alongside the one we know...?