Léon Spilliaert

23 Feb-25 May 2020

Overview

The Royal Academy of Arts will present the first monographic exhibition in the UK of Léon Spilliaert, a Flemish artist who remains surprisingly unknown outside of his native Belgium, where his work is widely admired and collected. Featuring some 90 works, the exhibition will provide a rare opportunity to view his intriguing and often mysterious work. As a young man Spilliaert was fuelled by existential angst, captured in a sequence of visionary self-portraits and atmospheric night-time scenes of his hometown, the North Sea resort Ostend. He moved to Brussels in 1920 and lived between the two cities for the rest of his life.