In the fall of 2024, Kasteel Wijlre estate and Bonnefanten are jointly organizing a comprehensive survey of the Marlies & Jo Eyck Collection. This important collection of contemporary art was acquired by the museum in 2012 with the support of the Province of Limburg. The collection has been assembled over the course of half a century by the Eyck couple, who have lived in the castle on the estate in Wijlre since 1980. During those decades, they have developed the estate into what it is today: a 'Gesamtkunstwerk' of architecture, nature and contemporary art. This is the first time since its acquisition by the Bonnefanten that the collection has been exhibited in its full extent. The exhibition is a tribute to distinctive private collecting. It includes more than 140 works by 60 artists; of these, approximately 25 works are on display in Wijlre. What is special about the exhibition in Wijlre is that the art is presented in the context in which it was originally collected: the estate with the castle home and gardens that was developed by the couple into a Gesamtkunstwerk. The relationship between art and nature, which plays an emphatic role in parts of the collection, is naturally expressed in the presentation in Wijlre. Artworks by Ad Dekkers and Peter Struycken, among others, collected in depth by the Eyck couple, also find fertile context in Wijlre due to the presence of permanent, monumental works by these artists on the estate's grounds.
On display at Bonnefanten
Starting on 21 September, the exhibition ‘Maintaining Its Spirit: Collection Marlies & Jo Eyck’ will be set up in three clusters spread out over ten galleries at the Bonnefanten. The first two rooms will feature a group of abstract sculptures from the 1980s as well as an extensive series of works by one artist, ‘computer pioneer’ Peter Struycken. Next, five galleries will provide an impression of the increasing multiformity of the collection since the 1990s, including works by Carel Visser, Ger van Elk and Guido Geelen, but also by Luc Tuymans, Marlene Dumas, Keith Edmier, Jaroslaw Fliciński and Fons Haagmans. The last three rooms, including the monumental main gallery, are devoted to geometric-abstract works from the 1960s and 1970s. The paintings and works on paper possess an international stature, helping Marlies and Jo Eyck establish their name in the art world.
A publication will be presented in the spring of 2025.
Artist information
Carel Blotkamp (b. 1945, Zeist)
Language plays a special role in the work of Carel Blotkamp. This is no coincidence, as Blotkamp has been a leading Dutch art critic since 1969. He has written many books, including an influential monograph on Piet Mondrian. From 1982 to 2007 he was professor of art history at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. His critical engagement with modernism is reflected in works like Clair obscur (2002), named after a technique from painting (and, later, photography) which emphasises the contrast between light and dark. The concept of clair-obscur is articulated in Blotkamp’s work by the use of two shades of blue, one pale and one dark. The sequins that are the main material in the piece shown here reflect the light in the exhibition space. This choice of materials is Blotkamp’s response to the formal lack of ambiguity in the work of his artistic role models, including Mondrian and Kazimir Malevich. While these modernists sought the essence of an image, Blotkamp challenges the essence, ‘blurring’ the well-known forms of Mondrian and Malevich by using a reflective material.
Jean-Marc Bustamante (b. 1952, Toulouse)
How do we experience the space around us? This is one of the questions that are central to the work of French artist Jean-Marc Bustamante. His oeuvre, which combines conceptual photography, painting and sculpture, explores the relationship between architecture, space and human perception. In the late 1970s Bustamante started work on his Tableaux series of huge colour photographs of abandoned urban environments, which are both serene and ghostly. The images rarely include humans, though their influence is constantly felt in the landscape.
At that time, the large format of his photographs was fairly unusual in photography. Such dimensions were found almost exclusively in painting. Gradually, however, due in part to improved camera and printing technology, more photographers have experimented with prints of such impressive size. The monumental images produced by these photographers, among which Bustamante was a pioneer, have gradually come to challenge painting.
Gianni Caravaggio (b. 1968, Rocca San Giovanni (IT))
Gianni Caravaggio is one of a new generation of Italian artists following in the footsteps of arte povera. This influential movement of the 1970s, in which the artists used natural, everyday materials, was known for its socially critical work. The artists were strongly influenced by the political and social unrest in Italy at the time, and rejected the growing gap between rich and poor, and the commercialisation of society and the art market.
Caravaggio’s sculpture also combines traditional materials with everyday objects, as in Attendere un mondo nuovo, where small red lentils are positioned at the corners of the aluminium sculpture. Before Caravaggio went to the art academy, he studied philosophy. His background in philosophy plays an important role in his artistic practice, which focuses on questions about the nature of reality and the relationship between humans and nature. His sculptures usually stand directly on the ground and have poetic titles that the viewer can interpret in various ways. Caravaggio thus explores how the form of a sculpture relates to the way the viewer experiences and internalises it.
Ad Dekkers (1938, Nieuwpoort - 1974, Gorinchem)
At a time when abstract expressionism was dominant, Ad Dekkers was part of a generation of post-war artists who sought to reformulate the geometric abstraction of Mondrian and his contemporaries. In his reliefs, sculptures and drawings, Dekkers avoided any kind of personal style. He attempted to elevate line, shape and colour above coincidental individual appearance and articulate universally applicable meaning. Dekkers was concerned with the visual impact of a clearly formulated form problem. He created pure, harmonious works, many of which are imbued with a great sense of classical tranquillity, using simple visual means: straight lines, primary colours plus black and white, and a few geometric figures – the circle, square and triangle.
Dekker’s work was created between 1960 and 1974, and his decision to take his own life brought a highly creative life to an abrupt end. He became both nationally and internationally famous in the mid-1960s.
César Domela (1900, Amsterdam – 1992, Paris (F))
César Domela was the youngest son of Ferdinand Domela Nieuwenhuis, the socialist politician and (later) anarchist. Unlike his father, Domela had no political ambitions, and was a self-taught artist. At the age of 20 he moved to Italy, where he met the dadaists Hans Arp and Hans Richter. In the early years of his career, he mainly produced abstract paintings, but around the age of 30 Domela began to develop an interest in multi-dimensional art, and began making oil paintings with a unique relief, using materials like glass, wood and metal. The composition which the Eycks bought for their collection in the 1970s dates from 1935.
Domela achieved success as an artist during his lifetime. At 25, he joined De Stijl, an influential Dutch art movement of the early twentieth century. His work was shown at the groundbreaking Cubism and Abstract Art exhibition (1936) at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, along with work by Henri Matisse, Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst and others.
Ger van Elk (1941, Amsterdam – 2014, Amsterdam)
Ger van Elk is regarded internationally as one of the founders of conceptual art. He called the traditional dividing lines between painting, sculpture and photography into question, in work that displays a great deal of humour and nuance. In each work or series of works, Van Elk would start with a specific event, view or convention, on which the work itself – created in a long and unfathomable process – would provide an entertaining and ironic but also layered and inventive commentary. Art itself was an inexhaustible source of parody, and sometimes vicious commentary. One example is his film ‘Some Natural Aspects of Painting and Sculpture’, in which the artist sits shivering and sweating, his upper body bare, simply to demonstrate to humanity properties of painting and sculpture.
Van Elk was fascinated by the close relationship between reality and illusion. This was for example reflected in an early work in which he mounted a photograph of a pavement on a real pavement, in the legendary exhibition ‘When Attitudes Become Form’, which took place in Bern, Switzerland in 1969.
Van Elk’s oeuvre encompasses sculpture, film, photographic work and painting. His work features in important museum collections around the world.
Guido Geelen (b. 1961, Thorn)
Guido Geelen broke with tradition in sculpture in the 1990s. For a long time, clay had been regarded as a craft material, used mainly for flowerpots and vases. It was used in art mainly as a medium for sketches or studies. But Geelen took this robust material and placed it at the centrepiece of his artistic practice. This fitted with a broader trend at the time, as artists started using craft materials to explore the relationship between art and design and raise questions about the autonomy of the individual artwork. Geelen’s work often refers to everyday objects. By skilfully distorting them, and twisting their function, he often manages to wrongfoot his viewers. Take Double Wash Basin, for example, which at first glance appears to be an abstract sculpture, and it is only after a time that we realise what we are actually looking at. Geelen thus creates a certain tension between the everyday object, the imperative of the material, the tradition of art history and the maker’s hand.
Bettie van Haaster (b. 1957, Vogelenzang)
The muted colours create a sense of space and light in the paintings of Bettie van Haaster. She always works on a small canvas, with visible brushstrokes. Van Haaster paints wet on wet, sculpting her layers of paint in, over and against each other, creating structures that are both layered and tightly packed. The tonal structure of her compositions reflects a particular interest in light, shade and backlighting. These effects are enhanced when daylight or artificial light touches the conspicuous surface of the paint. In their interaction, these traces form a kind of landscape, like viewing an expanse of terrain from a great height.
“Painting is a wordless activity”, Van Haaster once said. “At the same time, I’m always looking for words to express what I want to say with the image. I find those words in the work of writers, and in reviews and interviews, for example.” Her work is in museum and private collections in the Netherlands.
Nancy Haynes (b. 1947, Waterbury (USA))
American painter Nancy Haynes works in the tradition of abstraction in which Malevich and Mondrian worked. She has been producing meditative abstract paintings with a poetic undertone since the 1970s. In Haynes’ canvas paintings, and in her irregularly shaped panels of wood and slate, the brushwork suggests both landscape and architectural elements. The three-dimensionality created by mounting several picture planes over one another in relief produces a subtle interplay of light and shade. The image never resolves into a clear representation. The saturated colours create the illusion of depth, but this is both enhanced and counteracted by the shape and materiality of the panel.
Haynes’ work features in the collections of several leading museums in the United States.
Hiryczuk/Van Oevelen (b. 1977, Avignon (F); b. 1974, Steenbergen)
Elodie Hiryczuk and Sjoerd van Oevelen have been conducting research and making art together since 2001. The two artists met at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam in the 1990s, where they discovered their shared interest in perspective shifts. In their work, Hiryczuk and Van Oevelen explore the human view of nature. They have a particular interest in the grey area between ‘natural’ and ‘artificial’. The hyperrealistic way in which Hiryczuk and Van Oevelen depict their subjects gives their work an unreal quality. In the piece on display here, A Girl Making a Model of a Landscape (2005), we see a young woman making a model of a landscape in her home. Is imitating a landscape a way of taming nature? Or is the woman becoming ‘naturalised’ by bringing the landscape into her domestic sphere?
Hiryczuk and Van Oevelen had one of their first group exhibitions at Buitenplaats Kasteel Wijlre in 2005. Their work was included in the show ‘A Guest + A Host = A Ghost’.
Henri Jacobs (b. 1957, Zandoerle)
Henri Jacobs has lived and worked in Brussels since 1993, having studied art in Breda, Rotterdam and Amsterdam. In the 1980s and 90s Jacobs experimented with spatial structures and patterns in his paintings, referring to the style of Henri Matisse and Jasper Johns. This is reflected in works like Z.T. (1990), Palais à cinq salles (1990) and Enveloppe (1992), the first of which is on show here. Over the years, Jacobs came to prefer paper over canvas, and he developed a highly productive drawing practice. In 2013 Idea Books published a catalogue containing 666 drawings from Jacobs’ sketchbooks, the result of nine years of drawing. The original of one of these drawings, Journal Drawing 293 (2006), can be seen here.
Since 2013 Jacobs has also been publishing his drawings on his blog. He has exhibited his work at Centraal Museum Utrecht and the Van Abbemuseum. In 2017 he had a residency in Arita, Japan, where he combined drawing with the local porcelain tradition.
Fransje Killaars (b. 1959, Maastricht)
Fransje Killaars grew up in Maastricht, but she left in 1979 to study art at the Rijksacademie in Amsterdam. After graduating in 1984 Killaars initially developed a painting practice in which vibrant colours played a key role. She also worked as an assistant to the American conceptual artist Sol LeWitt, an experience that had a profound influence on her own practice. In the 1990s Killaars went on a working visit to India, where she was inspired by the textiles of a local weaving workshop. Back in the Netherlands, she started making large textile works herself and presented her first spatial textile work at Maastricht central railway station in 1995. The focus on vibrant colours in her early work is also apparent in her later work, including her sculpture Z.T. (1996), which is displayed here. Killaars uses colour to explore the relationship between an artwork and its surroundings. Her almost fluorescent colours disrupt the viewer’s gaze and have an impact on the space in which the work is shown.
In 2023 Killaars showed her textile installation Life and Death, made in memory of her father, sculptor Piet Killaars (1922-2015), at Museum Beelden aan Zee.
Pieter Laurens Mol (b. 1946, Breda)
Pieter Laurens Mol trained as a furniture maker in the 1960s before attending art college in Breda. His practical knowledge of materials can be seen in his sculptures, which combine various complex materials. His work De berusting (‘Resignation’) (1983) is made of wood, ceramics and lead, for example. Humour is also important in Mol’s work. Take the sculpture Sssssst (1974), which has an ambiguous meaning. The work is a depiction of its title in iron (with six large hanging SSes and a T) but is also a joke about the loudness of the material: steel on iron. Mol’s humour and multimedia approach were inspired by surrealism. Both aspects also recur in his ‘photosculptures’, as he himself calls them, which include La Fermentation (1987). In his sculptures, Mol does not seek to depict reality, but to emphasise that the work exists outside reality. Like Ger van Elk, Mol is one of the first generation of Dutch conceptual artists. His work has been exhibited all over the world.
Jan van Munster (1939, Gorinchem – 2024, Oost-Souburg)
Jan van Munster was a multimedia sculptor and ‘energy artist’. As a teenager, he left his hometown of Gorinchem to study art in Rotterdam. He did not return after graduating, as he had promised his father, but continued studying art in Amsterdam. In the 1970s he abandoned traditional sculptors’ materials like wood, metal and glass and started experimenting with energy: magnetic forces, sound and, above all, light. Van Munster was interested in the invisible tension between two points of contact, the physical relationship that can exist between different objects. From the early 1980s onwards he made dozens of light sculptures for various local authorities in the Netherlands and Germany. Some are still on display in outdoor spaces, including Blade of Grass with a Lot of Energy (2004), at the Maanderbroek intersection on the A12 motorway. The sculpture Embryo (1964), on display here, is from the artist’s early sculptural practice.
In 2019 Van Munster won the German Light Art Award for his entire body of work. He died suddenly in May 2024, a few weeks before his 85th birthday.
Nicholas Pope (b. 1949, Sydney)
British artist Nicholas Pope was born in Australia but has lived in the UK since studying at Bath Academy of Art (1970-73). In 1980 he represented Great Britain at the Venice Biennale. Pope also has longstanding links with the Dutch art world. In 1979 he had his first solo show at Art & Project, an influential Amsterdam gallery that closed in 2001. Art & Project played a major role in introducing conceptual art in the Netherlands.
Pope is known for his minimalist sculptures. He likes to use natural materials, like the wood in Apple Pile (1978), which was part of his Venice Biennale presentation. In his early sculptures, Pope preferred to work the material as little as possible. Rather than cutting his materials, he would stack them, or position them next to one another, like the stones in Four Wilderness Stones (1980). Pope is part of a tradition in British sculpture that takes a conceptual approach to natural materials. Other artists who work in this tradition include Antony Gormley, Richard Deacon and Tony Cragg.
Peter Struycken (b. 1939 – The Hague)
Struycken is regarded as a pioneer of the use of computers in art. He makes work in the tradition of geometric abstraction that reflects laws and systems. Struycken visually explores the relationship between colours, while at the same time using algorithms to change the position of colour in space and time. The rapid development of digital technology has allowed him to use increasingly complex programs to produce images with great visual immediacy. His art ranges from geometrically abstract to spatially hallucinatory, and evokes associations with phenomena from the natural world due to similarities in visual variation.
Struycken’s work takes many forms – paintings, drawings, moving images – and has many applications in architecture, the theatre and music. In 1981 Struycken designed a well-known postage stamp featuring a likeness of Queen Beatrix made up of countless points that were all the same size. Along with Berend Hendriks, he is regarded as the founder of the 'Arnhem School', an art movement known for its attempts to integrate urban planning, architecture and art. His work is in museum collections in the Netherlands and abroad.
Shinkichi Tajiri (1923, Los Angeles (USA) – Baarlo, 2009)
Shinkichi Tajiri had Japanese parents, was born an American, and took Dutch nationality towards the end of his life. The institutional racism shown towards Japanese and Japanese-American people in America after World War Two prompted Tajiri to go into exile. He emigrated to Europe in 1948. These experiences played a vital role in his life and work. His sculptures, films, poems, photographs and paintings are imbued with symbols of and references to Japanese and American identity, his alienation from his homeland and his experiences in World War Two. War, injustice, racism, migration, displacement and identity are important themes in Tajiri’s work.
Tajiri’s body of work is inextricably linked with important developments in art: existentialism in Paris, and CoBrA and pop art in 1960s Amsterdam. He took part in Documenta in Kassel in 1959, 1964 and 1968, and in 1962 he represented the Netherlands at the Venice Biennale. Tajiri was a professor at Berlin’s art academy for twenty years, where he taught students to observe themselves clinically, as an anthropologist would. He continued to experiment with new media, techniques and materials throughout his life.
Curdin Tones (b. 1976, Tschlin)
Swiss artist Curdin Tones moved to Amsterdam in the late 1990s to study at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy. He now divides his time between Amsterdam and the village of Tschlin in Switzerland where he was born, where he facilitates the Somalgors74 residency. The goal of the residency is to bring artists to the small mountain village and organise something for the local community with them, whether it be a workshop, lecture or performance. In this way, Tones hopes to ensure his birthplace remains a vibrant hub, and to create moments of connection for its residents. There is therefore both a creative and a social aspect to the residency.
Tones also remains in dialogue with the place of his birth in his own artistic work. In the photographic work Tschlin (2005) we see a child carrying a pile of wooden blocks. The two nameless sculptures (2004) feature wood that has been planed smooth and nailed down, respectively. Tones’ work includes material in both worked and unworked states, giving the viewer an insight into the journey that sculptures make before they become works of art.
Sybille Ungers (b. 1960, Germany – lives in Ireland)
Sybille Ungers’ work features mixed media: charcoal, oils, chalk pencils, pastels, watercolours and gouache. A few simple geometric shapes create a suggestive colourful abstraction. Ungers is probably no longer active as a professional artist.
herman de vries (b. 1931 – Alkmaar)
de vries became involved with the ‘Nul-beweging’ (the Dutch branch of Group Zero) in the 1960s. The group’s work focused on seriality, neutrality and repetition. From 1975 onwards de vries increasingly turned his attention to processes and phenomena in the natural world.
Sequence and order are important principles in his oeuvre. Titles like ‘to be all ways to be’, with which de vries represented the Netherlands at the Venice Biennale in 2015, allude to the notion that these six words might also be placed in a different order. This reveals the philosophy behind de vries’ practice: ordering what exists, thus drawing attention to both the uniformity and the diversity of the things around us. His goal is to highlight the poetry in things.
de vries attended horticultural college in Hoorn, where he trained as a biologist and naturalist, and went on to work as a botanist for the Phytopathology Authority in Wageningen. His work is in museum collections all over the world.