The Black Carnival. James Ensor and Witold Wojtkiewicz
3 October 2025 – 11 January 2026
The exhibition confronts the works of two significant artists from the turn of the nineteenth and the twentieth century. It explores themes of the masquerade, the theatre, the circus, dreams, eroticism and death. Known for their penchant for fantasy, irony and the grotesque, the two painters were deeply rooted in their respective cultures and art circles: the modernist milieus of the Young Belgium and the Young Poland. Ensor evoked the traditions of Dutch art, with its bawdy humour, defiance and didacticism, of folk theater troupes and of the animated street carnivals of Flanders. Wojtkiewicz, submerged in a world of fairytales and dreamlike visions, drew from phenomena such as the cabaret, the comedy theatre Zielony Balonik and Kraków’s folk nativity scenes (szopka).
We offer a playful juxtaposition of these two individuals, who are usually treated as peculiar, isolated cases. The idea of the carnival represents life-as-spectacle, the world turned upside-down, madness, anarchy, chaos, a freedom from norms and conventions. The exhibition is organized by key themes that correspond to major areas in Ensor’s and Wojtkiewicz’s imaginaria, and visualize universal problems in turn-of-the-century art, literature and theatre: Bohemianism; Masqueraders of the Abyss—the Carnival, the Theatre, the Circus; Fairytales and Childhood Fantasies; Thanatos.
The Black Carnival. James Ensor and Witold Wojtkiewicz is NMW’s first exhibition based on a Polish–Belgian partnership. For context, we will also present marionettes, masks and carnival costumes as well as paintings, drawings and prints by other Polish and Belgian artists who were the two protagonists’ contemporaries.
Curators: Joanna Kilian-Michieletti, Agnieszka Lajus, Kamilla Pijanowska-Badysiak, Herwig Todts (Musée Royal des Beaux-Arts d'Anvers)