Cross Talk #2 | Léon Spilliaert x Simone Guillissen-Hoa | Portraits x Self-Portraits

As is often the case when unearthing the particular history of female artists, fragments and snippets of stories, places, and objects are pieced together. A portrait painting caught our attention: Guillissen-Hoa by Spilliaert (1936). What does this work tell us about its artist, its subject, and its contexts - artistic, socio-cultural, economic, geographical, etc. - and what binds them - the painter to the architect, the artist to the model, the model to the portrait, and the portrait to the artist? The analysis of this work is part of a broader contextual reading of gender issues in Spilliaert's portraits and the potential process of racialization of models in a young 20th century still fascinated by so-called foreign, "exotic" subjects.

A cross talk hosted by Apolline Vranken (FNRS researcher in architecture, ULB) and Apolline Malevez (Ph.D. in art history, postdoctoral researcher, UGent) around the work Portrait of Simone Hoa at 20 (1936, Léon Spilliaert).