Naast de traditionele geschiedenis van Amsterdam biedt het Amsterdam Museum tegengeluiden en minder bekende en recentere geschiedenissen van de stad. Met objecten en werken uit het koloniale verleden van Nederland, wordt een stukje geschiedenis ontsloten die minder bekend is en lange tijd minder zichtbaar werd gehouden.
Category Archives: 20e eeuw
Amsterdam Museum in de Hermitage – Hermitage, Amsterdam
Lubaina Himid. Tate Modern – Londen, Engeland
Postwar Modern. Barbican Gallery – Londen, Engeland
A revelatory new take on art in Britain after the Second World War, a period when artists had to make sense of an entirely altered world.
Postwar Modern explores the art produced in Britain in the wake of a cataclysmic war. Certainty was gone, and the aftershocks continued, but there was also hope for a better tomorrow. These conditions gave rise to an incredible richness of imagery, forms and materials in the years that followed.
Focusing on ‘the new’, Postwar Modern features 48 artists and around 200 works of painting, sculpture, photography, collage and installation. It explores the subjects that most preoccupied artists, among them the body, the post-atomic condition, the Blitzed streetscape, private relationships and imagined future horizons. As well as reconsidering well-known figures, the exhibition foregrounds artists who came to Britain as refugees from Nazism or as migrants from a crumbling empire, in addition to female artists who have tended to be overlooked.
A Century of the Artist’s Studio: 1920 – 2020 – Whitechapel Gallery. Londen
The Whitechapel Gallery presents a 100-year survey of the studio through the work of artists and image-makers from around the world.
Whether it be an abandoned factory, an attic or a kitchen table, it is the artist’s studio where the great art of our time is conceived and created. In this multi-media exhibition, the wide-ranging possibilities and significance of these crucibles of creativity take centre stage and new art histories around the modern studio emerge through striking juxtapositions of under-recognised artists with celebrated figures in Western art history.
The exhibition brings together more than 100 works by over 80 artists and collectives from Africa, Australasia, South Asia, China, Europe, Japan, the Middle East, North and South America. They range from modern icons such as Francis Bacon, Louise Bourgeois, Pablo Picasso, Egon Schiele and Andy Warhol, to contemporary figures such as Walead Beshty, Lisa Brice and Kerry James Marshall.
The exhibition includes paintings, sculptures, installations and films depicting the studio as work of art and presents documentation of artists’ studios by world-renowned photographers and film-makers. A series of ‘studio corners’ also recreate the actual environments where great art has been produced.
Louise Bourgeois. The Woven Child – Hayward Gallery, Londen
In the last two decades of her career, Bourgeois began to incorporate clothes from all stages of her life into her art.
This developed into a varied body of work – from monumental installations, to figurative sculptures and abstract collages – incorporating textiles such as bed linen, handkerchiefs, tapestry, and needlepoint.
Bourgeois’s fabric works mine the themes of identity and sexuality, trauma and memory, guilt and reparation that are central to her long and storied career.
‘I have always had a fascination with the magic power of the needle. The needle is used to repair the damage. It’s a claim to forgiveness.’
Louise Bourgeois: The Woven Child sums up this wonderfully inventive and compelling final chapter in this extraordinary artist’s work.
Kirchner & Nolde. Expressionisme Kolonialisme – Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam
Paris La Defense Art Collection- Parijs, Frankrijk
Raoul Dufy. Musée Montmartre – Parijs, Frankrijk
Picasso & Rodin. Musee Picasso, Parijs, Frankrijk
Permanente collectie. Musée des Beaux-Arts. Rouen, Frankrijk
Pinault Collection – Bourse de Commerce, Parijs, Frankrijk
Eerste openstelling van Pinault Collection, Bourse de Commerce.Over het algemeen vind ik de collectie wat tegenvallen. Het enige dat me aanspreekt zijn de werken in met name galerie 7, met een grote vertegenwoordiging van zwarte makers, zoals Kerry James Marshall, Ser Serpas, Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, Antonio Oba, maar ook werken van Martin Kippenberger, Peter Doig, Marlene Dumas etc.
Permanente collectie – Musee d’Art Moderne de Paris, Parijs, Frankrijk
The Power of my Hands. Afrique(s): artistes femmes – Musee d’Art Moderne de Paris, Parijs, Frankrijk
a group of works by sixteen women artists from various English – and Portuguese – speaking African countries or the diaspora. The result is an insight into an African contemporary art scene rarely presented in France.
The Power of My Hands tells us how artists can use their personal histories to address the social issues that govern the condition of women today. Examining a range of themes – the body, sexuality, self-representation, motherhood, beliefs – the exhibition asks how, for Black women, attitudes to privacy reveal what goes unsaid and their relationship with the world. It does this via an intermingling of the notions of memory, family, spirituality and imagination.
The works on display – including paintings, pottery, photographs, videos, performances and needlework – celebrate the liberating energy of the «power of their hands».
Even if some of these artists make no claim to feminist or radical political stances, the exhibits enable the sharing of individual experiences whose collective, universal assertion chimes resonantly with the famous 1970s slogan «the personal is political».
With works by: Stacey Gillian Abe, Njideka Akunyili Crosby, Gabrielle Goliath, Kudzanai-Violet Hwami, Keyezua, Lebohang Kganye, Kapwani Kiwanga, Senzeni Marasela, Grace Ndiritu, Wura-Natasha Ogunji, Reinata Sadimba, Lerato Shadi, Ana Silva, Buhlebezwe Siwani, Billie Zangewa, Portia Zvavahera.
Vaste collectie (5e verdieping) – Centre Pompidou, Parijs, Frankrijk
Elles font l’abstraction – Centre Pompidou, Parijs, Frankrijk
he exhibition sets out to write the history of the contributions of women artists to abstraction, with one hundred and six artists and more than five hundred works dating from the 1860s to the 1980s.
“Women in Abstraction” provides an opportunity to discover artists who represent discoveries both for the specialist and for the general public. It showcases the work of many of these women who suffer from a lack of visibility and recognition beyond the frontiers of their countries. Reviewing their specific contribution to the history of abstraction, the exhibition focuses on the careers of artists who were sometimes unjustly eclipsed from the history of art.
Frida Kahlo & Diego Rivera – Cobramuseum Amstelveen
Tell me your story. 100 jaar Afrikaans-Amerikaanse kunst – Kunsthal KAdE, Amersfoort
Op de eerste werkdag in Amersfoort gebruik ik de pauze (en iets meer) om de expositie Tell me your story te bekijken. De expositie toont 100 jaar Afrikaans-Amerikaanse kunst van artiesten als Kehinde Wiley, Henry Taylor, Kerry James Marshall, Devan Shimomaya en anderen. Veel kunstwerken zijn activistisch, enkele bijzonder grimmig en weer andere een weergave van een tijdsgewricht. Een indrukwekkende expositie en bijzonder getimed nu de Black Lives Matter-beweging steeds meer tractie krijgt.
Surrealisme – Cobra Museum, Amstelveen
De exposities in het Cobra Museum staan in het teken van surrealisme. In de ene expo de werken van het Boymans van Beuningen, de andere expo de werken van het Cobra Museum zelf. Zoals verwacht is de expo interessant maar niet helemaal mijn ding. Er hangen grote namen: Magritte, Ernst, Dali en meer. Op de benedenverdieping hangen werken van recentere aard, namelijk de stukken van de Amstelveen Triënnale.
Jan Cremer. Noordwaarts 2010-2020 – Museum Jan, Amstelveen
Onverwacht bleek er bij Museum Jan ook een expo te zijn van werken van Jan Cremer. De onstuimige, reliëfrijke werken van Cremer verbeelden vooral de zee: woeste golven met schuimkragen, indrukwekkend en soms zelfs angstaanjagend wild. Hier en daar worden de werken verbonden met fotografie uit de jaren dat Cremer op de grote vaart werkte en waarbij hij met name tochten naar het noorden ondernam (hence the name). Hoewel de werken enigszins monotoon worden als er zoveel soortgelijke naast elkaar hangen, was ik toch positief verrast de expo te zien. Heel wat anders natuurlijk dan Lichtenstein, waar ik voor kwam, maar een mooie aanvulling.