The curators of the exhibition Sweet 18, Lusa Bernal, Dieter Van Den Storm, Wim Mertens and Helene Bremer, have selected fifty contemporary artists and designers whose works have been inspired by eighteenth-century aesthetics and themes. Numerous traditional and modern mediums are represented: painting, photography, printmaking, installation, sculpture, ceramics, video and fashion. The exhibition offers visitors an exceptional opportunity to consider today’s artistic milieu through an eighteenth-century lens.

The curators have carefully staged an entertaining tour that invites spectators to escape reality and enter an enchanting fantasy world.  The splendidly restored seventeenth-century castle—a favorite summer residence of the aristocratic d’Ursel family during the eighteenth century—provides a rich and unique backdrop to the exhibition. Upon arrival, visitors are presented with a stunning catalogue cum guide that directs them through narrow corridors, winding stairways, and a maze of small rooms around the house. The guide is available in French, English and Flemish.  Although it excludes some practical aspects, such as the dimensions of art works, and further information about artistic processes would have been insightful, the catalogue succeeds in providing ample explanations about the artists’ inspirations. A short biography of each artist is also provided. Carefully illuminated art works are organised in cabinets and niches, and placed on tables and hung on walls so that diverse artists, genres and mediums intermingle, creating a dramatic mise-en-scene. Works are also spread across the gardens and in the apartments throughout the castle. As most works are represented in the catalogue, there are no distracting labels next to displays. Overall, the aim is to create an intimate atmosphere. One feels as if one were visiting a private home collection rather than an institutional museum exhibition. This method of display is fitting given the nature of eighteenth-century art as consumed in its time.

The curators explain that the name Sweet 18 is mostly an homage to the cultural icon Marie Antoinette. The exhibition shows how popular culture continues to be enthralled by accusations regarding Madame Deficit’s debased lifestyle, outrageous and often scandalous fashion sense and death by guillotine during the Reign of Terror.  For example, the artist Bouke De Vries takes inspiration from events leading to the famous women’s march on Versailles. Spread across a long dining table in the Castle d’ Ursel’s Hall of Mirrors, De Vries’s compelling installation combines fragmented, white porcelain figurines and plates with colourful plastic figures from broken Transformer toys to create a fantastic war banquet entitled War and Pieces. Some of the female figures wave tricolour flags and hold bayonetted muskets in their hands; their stance is a direct reference to the figure of Liberty seen in Eugene Delacroix’s famous masterpiece Liberty Leading the People (1830, Louvre, Paris). The work evokes the traditional banquet held on the night before a battle; it also alludes to class conflict and to the Queen’s role in the French Revolution. The centerpiece of the banquet is an exploding mushroom cloud, made up of scores of fragmented porcelain shards.  It invites the viewer to consider war within broader contexts and in the face of global revolution.  While work like this prompts visitors to think about the queen within political affairs, Sweet 18 equally presents insight into eighteenth-century aristocratic fashion.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the subject of dress is prevalent throughout the show. Contemporary, international designers sampling the eighteenth century include, Walter Van Beirendonck; Bernhard Willhelm, Jolien-Rosanne Klaassen for Viona Ielegems, Yohji Yamamoto, Thierry Mugler; Raf Simons for Dior,  Olivier Theyskens for Rocha, Nina Ricci, and Nicholas Ghesquiere for Balenciaga. Many of the featured designers explore this trans-historical connection. The British milliner Stephen Jones offers four hats influenced by the shapes and styles of that period. Similarly, Kathy Dalwood’s busts draw on the eighteenth-century craze for decorating hats, wigs and dresses with bizarre ornaments.  Such seemingly frivolous arrangements were often loaded with underlying messages. This is also reflected in Dalwood’s creative process.  Amongst other objects, the artist recycles scraps of fabrics, pipes, paper, toys, plastic fruits and souvenirs from buildings. She arranges this detritus around the faces of old dolls and places them on plinths.  She then casts them in plaster.  The end results are contemporary, sculptural busts that are both playful and provocative.

On 16 October 1793, by order of the Revolutionary Tribunal Marie Antoinette was decapitated, and this is another aspect of the queen that artists in the show revisited. The photographer Erwin Olaf offers a grisly portrait simply titled Marie Antoinette. It is of a woman wearing white, satin brocades and a short, white tulle skirt. Her overall appearance is pristine. However, Olaf cuts the photograph of the figure in half, she is only visible from below the waistline.  In her hands is what appears to be her own severed head. Royal blood streams to the floor, and it splashes onto her smooth, glossy shoes. It contrasts starkly with the thick layers of white paint and rouge on her face. The severed head and the contrast between artifice (the make-up) and nature (the subject’s blood) allude to the queen’s desire to preserve the privileges and lineage of the aristocracy and to the story of her execution. Elsewhere, the British ceramicist Claire Partington also implies the queen’s tragic death. She creates a large porcelain figure dressed in a magnificently decorated mantua gown; the sculpture is reminiscent of a bottle. However, the figure’s head has been replaced with the head of a bear, and the human head lies at her feet. The style in which the bear is produced deliberately references a particular style of salt-glazed beer jug produced in Staffordshire during the eighteenth century. The rough surface texture of the bear’s face contrasts drastically with the smooth glaze used on the rest of the figure, which conveys elegance and refinement and once again evokes the dichotomy between artifice and nature. The juxtaposition equally demonstrates the artist’s ability to manipulate the porcelain material.

At the heart of the exhibition are numerous works that draw on eighteenth-century culture to explore broader artistic themes. In their reinterpretation of eighteenth-century French and Italian masters, some works flirt with ideas of perception. Overlooking the castle’s foyer are two large, bronze sculptures entitled Daphnis and Chloe (clockwise and counterclockwise) by the neo-conceptual artist Wim Delvoye. The artist draws on subjects painted by Francois Boucher. He casts the mythological characters into a swirling spiral, conveying their eternal enmeshment. Walking around the sculptures creates an interesting illusion: at times the figures appear to be stretching in an upward movement, but at other times they appear motionless and flat. Traditionally, painters used their craft to try and create the illusion of a third dimension on a flat surface. However, with Delvoye’s sculpture it appears at times as if the three-dimensional work is imitating the two-dimensional flatness of painting. As the exhibition moves along to one of the apartments upstairs, Patrick Hughes also explores perspective. In his three-dimensional painting Around the Castle, Hughes draws on eighteenth-century paintings of vedute by artists like Giovanni Antonio Canaletto. Like Delvoye, Hughes blurs the lines between painting and sculpture. He builds a three-dimensional painting, incorporating the science of perception as seen in his use of reverse perspective. His piece is constructed from several painted panels that have been organized in a row; some protrude, others lie flat. The alternation between receding and protruding panels tricks the mind into believing that the overall painting shifts and comes to life as the viewer changes positions.

Some of the featured artists draw on the eighteenth-century to engage with ideas concerning identity. The exhibition catalogue notes that Cindy Sherman’s Madame de Pompadour nee Poisson (1723-1764) Soup Tureen and Platter (1990), incorporates a soup bowl and platter that had been initially commissioned in the eighteenth-century by Madame de Pompadour from the famous French porcelain factory Limoges. The deep blue and silver colouring and long, curvilinear forms of Sherman’s elaborate tureen and platter are typical rococo characteristics. However, Sherman uses the decorative objects as a means of exploiting ideas about consumption, performance and artifice. The original cartouches adorning the tureen and platter that would have portrayed a milky skinned Madam de Pompadour are erased and replaced with a portrait of the artist herself in transfer print, masquerading in the role of Madame de Pompadour. Also questioning ideas about identity is the artist Kimiko Yoshida who offers large sculptural busts of both Louis XIV and Marie Antoinette from her series called My Sculpture. Self Portrait. Yoshida recreates the iconic bust of the king produced by Gian Lorenzo Bernini in 1665, but she replaces the king’s face with her own. She also ‘restores’ the queen’s head with a self-portrait of herself dressed as a geisha, reminding viewers that beauty is a construct. Yoshida’s work melds cultural references and breaks through temporal boundaries. It also alternates between the personal and the historical.

As this show demonstrates, Queen Marie-Antoinette continues to inspire artists’ imaginations. The show’s greatest strength is that it highlights the presence of the past across numerous areas of contemporary art, fashion and design. Within the enchanting setting of the castle, the route dictated by the catalogue displays works in such a way that they alternate and sometimes challenge one another. The chosen artifacts are neither copies nor truly ‘new’; rather, they produce a new hybrid that resists the taxonomic impulse that was key to the Enlightenment period.

Sweet 18 is on display at Kasteel D’Ursel Hingene, Belgium from 1st May to 5th July 2015.