Antwerp museum revives Magritte’s voice in new AI-guided exhibition
The Royal Museum of Fine Arts Antwerp (KMSKA) will open a temporary exhibition devoted to Belgian surrealist René Magritte on Saturday. Rather than providing an overview of his entire body of work, the exhibition will focus on a rare lecture that Magritte delivered at the museum in 1938.
"Magritte was deliberately enigmatic and rarely spoke about his work," said KMSKA director Carmen Willems. "He gave just three lectures in his lifetime, one of them here in Antwerp. This became the starting point for the exhibition. Magritte chose this city to share his ideas, so we’re giving him the floor once again.”
The museum has done so literally, using AI to recreate Magritte’s voice and re-enact the 1938 lecture, which guides visitors through the exhibition. Most of the works on display are on loan, since the KMSKA only owns four original Magrittes.
“During our long closure for renovation, we built an extensive network by lending out our own works,” said museum president Luk Lemmens.
In this recreated lecture, Magritte talks the audience through the process of creating his most famous paintings. He explains that his artistic journey was a lifelong effort to understand the mystery and magic of painting.
It saw him evolve from early experiments in abstraction to his signature flat figurative style, characterised by paradoxical juxtapositions of image and language. The exhibition reflects Magritte’s own approach of organising his art around recurring themes, such as doors, windows and women.
Surrealism in full sunlight
René Magritte (1898–1967) was born in Lessines, in Hainaut, and became one of the leading figures of Belgian surrealism. Throughout his career, he collaborated with Belgian, French, and American contemporaries to explore what he termed “surrealism in full sunlight”, as well as the vibrant Période Vache of the late 1940s.
The final decades of his life were marked by a return to his iconic motifs: the bowler hat, the cloud and the word. He died from pancreatic cancer in Brussels in 1967.
Magritte: La Ligne de Vie runs from 15 November to 22 February.
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