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Everything in museums, galleries, on roundabouts and village squares, and hanging over sofas. And Marina Abramovic

Impressive Waterline Museum maintains mystery of Fort near Vechten

A few thousand years from now, archaeologists will find a bizarre concrete sculpture in sediment layers at the bottom of the future European Sea. Round, organic shapes, a square box with ready-made chambers, pipes, and a relief in the soil. Totally different from the concrete boxes they found before. Unknowingly, they will rediscover the mystery of the Nieuwe Hollandse Waterlinie. The... 

Rik Wouters, Autumn, 1913, 135 x 140 cm, Oil on canvas, Royal Museum of Fine Arts Antwerp ©Lukasart in Flanders

Belgian colour on Dutch cheeks - 7 reasons why you should visit 'Colour Unleashed' soon

Sometimes I think I was born in the wrong time. Wouldn't it be wonderful to live in the period when modern art was born? Then I correct myself: no, there were many problems and uncertainties back then too. But the new exhibition Colour Unleashed at the Gemeentemuseum Den Haag makes me hesitate again. Because the exhibited... 

Emperor Constantine and the great upheaval in Rome

The man with the firm jaws and vacant, upward-looking eyes is not particularly attractive. His face does appear on all the posters around town. However, it is something other than this robust stone head against the black background that triggers you, on the poster of the exhibition at the Nieuwe Kerk in Amsterdam. That is the tilted O of the... 

Italian grandfather of arthouse cinema

With Michelangelo Antonioni - Il maestro del cinema moderno, EYE has once again managed to put together a flawless and solid film exhibition. George Vermij visited the exhibition on the Italian master filmmaker and looks back on his influential oeuvre. In Dino Risi's road movie Il Sorpasso (1962), the passionate and extroverted Vittorio Gassman takes on a young and reserved Jean-Louis Trintignant... 

Montecelio, M.C. Escher, March 1924, East Indian ink on paper, © The M.C. Escher Company BV, Baarn

Newly discovered and unique: unknown Escher on display in The Hague #escher

Museum Escher in het Paleis has acquired an unknown early work by M.C. Escher. The museum announced this today. In the print, a depiction of the Italian town of Montecelio, the famous graphic artist experimented with a variety of techniques. The museum is delighted. Because it's not every day you find an unknown but important Escher anymore. It must have been quite a marriage,... 

Hans van Beers is no more - another loss for Dutch cultural life

On Tuesday afternoon, 25 August, Hans van Beers (Eindhoven, 1941) passed away. He was an important figure in our cultural life, his curriculum is seemingly endless. Among other things, he was alderman of culture in Den Bosch, co-founder of Pinkpop, chairman of the Mondriaan Fund, interim director of the Stedelijk Museum, director of the Rotterdam Philharmonic Orchestra, the VPRO and the Amsterdam Conservatory of Music, board member... 

Design Rotterdam CS has been seen before. In Monte Carlo.

Citroën lovers always got warm feelings at the sight of Rotterdam's new central station. Because indeed, that shark's mouth, with or without beach balls in front of it, is somewhat reminiscent of the iconic French car brand's logo. Well. As it turns out, the comparison goes further. Back deep in the 1960s, there was a Citroën pavilion in Monte Carlo in southern France. Citrophile... 

New work by Rob Scholte: Old children's money as high art

So you just keep looking at it. Like looking at a television in a shop window or on a stage, which always catches your attention. But this is not a television. These are marbles. Jaap Roell became fascinated by them. The art journalist and gallery owner has four works by Rob Scholte hanging and can't get enough of them. And frankly neither can we.... 

Vincent WJ Van Gerven Oei

Albania special (2). Vincent van Gerven Oei: 'This country is a better breeding ground than the Netherlands'

If anyone can give a good picture of cultural development in Albania, it is Vincent van Gerven Oei. This Dutch philosopher and artist has lived in the country for five years and, as an insider and outsider, therefore has a strong opinion. I meet him at café Bukowski in a hip entertainment district of Tirana. When the embassy told me about Van Gerven Oei... 

Den Bosch delivered great encounters with @TFBoulevard

It was cold in Den Bosch on Sunday 16 August and it rained as if it were not August but November. Not the ideal weather for the closing night of festival Boulevard. It was, however, an atmospheric setting for some installations and the performance 'Hello fear' that were on my programme. The installations were hidden behind the Mariapavilion (Tramkade's emergency location) and despite the... 

Albania special (1): does Tirana want modern art?

Europe's last cultural secret, is how Albania is also known. Mainly because the small Balkan country was shielded from the rest of Europe for a long time: until the communist totalitarian regime fell in 1991. How does such a change affect its culture? I become fascinated by this question during my holiday and speak to a number of people. Including our own ambassador, Dewi from the... 

Sierk van Meeuwen, Terrorist (source: zomerexpo.nl)

'Also nice. A hot chick with a kalashnikov.' Amateurs and pros in Haags Gemeentemuseum

The annual Summer Expo at Gemeentemuseum Den Haag is open to submissions from amateurs. But in the end, as many as 70% of the entrants turn out to have attended an art school, and even 80% of the selected entries were made by professional artists. With two guests, I visit the Summer Expo. Museum visitor Rob van Berlo picks his favourites. Gallery owner Nena Milinkovic I ask the same,... 

Casual encounters in a sanatorium: @TFBoulevard has a real theme

Theatre festival Boulevard has a theme. This is new, and actually unusual for a large-scale festival like the one in Den Bosch. After all, how do you find so many performances for those claimed 120,000 spectators that are all about that same theme? The solution is simple: you don't have to. You can also attach a theme to a few appealing performances and a single part... 

Curve Boukje Schweigman

By Boukje Schweigmans Curve to higher consciousness on @TFBoulevard

  Some say there is a tunnel of light you pass through when you die. Could be, there are people with near-death experiences who describe such a thing. Personally, I find the paintings depicting such tunnels of light rather kitschy. Clouds with a scary eye or a man with a beard at the end.... But now sculpture-dance-design artist... 

World Press Photo wants to start selling photos. To help photographers.

There really is no better place to display press photos than a church. At least, as long as it is one of those Dutch churches like the one in Naarden. White plastered walls, no distracting statues and paintings. And yet that hallowed atmosphere that sort of belongs to what all those winners of World Press Photo 2015 portray: terrible stories, glorious victories and mysteries that... 

Vincent van Gogh finally joins artist group

In this Van Gogh year, the painter has become part of a real group, an artist community, something he never managed to do during his lifetime. With the exhibition 'When I Give Myself, I give Myself', the Van Gogh Museum connects 23 contemporary artists to the lonely Van Gogh, who had hardly any friends during his life and sold only one painting. The... 

Sofie van der Sman at her project The Fantastic Island. Photo author.

12 signs of hope at graduation exhibition KABK

Last week, graduates of the Royal Academy of Art (KABK) in The Hague showed their final exam projects in an exhibition. An exhibition that every year is far too big to see everything in one week. But this year, above all, an exhibition that provoked: to think, to wonder, to smile and to come back again and again.

I still like to be snarky about excesses in conceptual art. Art of the sort: just put up a tent from the shop in...

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Feeling the 3d scan (photo author)

Rembrandt expert in an hour thanks to the Mauritshuis

For eight years, the Mauritshuis researched and restored his painting 'Saul and David'. As a result, it can now be definitively attributed to Rembrandt. But the small exhibition 'Rembrandt? The Case of Saul and David' mainly shows how the museum collaborated with all kinds of different scientists and laboratories to unravel the numerous mysteries surrounding the canvas. As a visitor, you will be taken through the... 

JSF Fort Asperen by Stefan Gross. Photo Wijbrand Schaap

Gimme Shelter: impressive sculptures in unused war machines

Fort Nieuwersluis is the biggest surprise of the art event Gimme Shelter. Until a year and a half ago, the defensive work was a no-go-area. The BB ('Bescherming Burgerbevolking') sat there until 1989 to protect telephone lines during, but especially after World War III, when the rest of the Netherlands would be hiding under the kitchen table from the H-Bomb. When the atomic-proof fortress became permanently obsolete, the... 

Vormidable: two Flemish visions of renewal sculpture

The annual major sculpture expo in The Hague in 2015 is called 'Vormidable'. In its own museum, on Lange Voorhout and at several satellite locations, Museum Beelden aan Zee shows how Flemish art experienced a true revival from the 1990s onwards. Panamarenko, De Bruyckere, Fabre, but also lesser-known names renewed sculpture - in two opposite ways. Guest curator Stef van... 

A vital and pitiful procession: William Kentridge at EYE

With its latest retrospective If We Ever Get To Heaven, EYE again convincingly and confidently presents itself as a museum that looks beyond film history. This was already evident in previous exhibitions such as Expanded Cinema, which showcased visual artists working at the intersection of film and art. Now William Kentridge has been given the honour of... 

Proceeds from 30 years of Art and Kitsch, or too the rare pen candlestick that served as a toilet roll holder

In the end, homo calculus - and who isn't, a "calculating man" - turns out to be primarily concerned with the monetary value of art objects, and only then - sometimes a long time later - with their beauty, artistic value or rarity. Every episode of the television programme Between Art and Kitsch demonstrates this. It also applies... 

Christian Hornsleth makes debut in Amsterdam

Hornsleth in Amsterdam: 'If they don't get the joke, fuck them.'

Christian von Hornsleth is exhibiting in Amsterdam, and there was an immediate small riot. An organisation that raises money against trafficking in women no longer wanted to receive a contribution from the proceeds of his exhibition in Amsterdam, because the artist, whose conceptual work often features porn images, would actually be an advocate of prostitution. Something Hornsleth himself vehemently denies. The... 

Catinka Kersten and Dick van Broekhuizen look on at the placement (author's photo)

Catinka Kersten in Images by the Sea - one year after academy

Museum Beelden aan Zee placed a concrete sculpture by 26-year-old artist Catinka Kersten on the patio at the end of March: 'And everyone held their breath during that fraction of centuries'. It consists of five concrete human figures stacked on top of each other, which appear to be made of fabric. Kersten completed her studies at the Royal Academy of Art (KABK) in The Hague in 2013 with a series of hunting animals in plaster and cotton. The museum, with associated scientific institute and plaster library, is considered one of the figureheads of sculpture in the Netherlands. How did this museum come to choose such a young artist and what does inclusion in its collection mean for her?

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