Ever-changing spaces

Next to the collection-presentations and the temporary exhibitions the museum contains a few rooms that alternatley will be established with works from the collection. These works will be collected from the depot and presented shortly in these ever-changing rooms. In this way the passage to the collection-presentations and the temporary exhibitions will remain refreshing and amazing for the visitor.

At the moment the following artists are represented in the ever-changing spaces:

Fons Haagmans (1948, Schinnen)

Fons Haagmans is one of today's most important artists of the Netherlands. As a painter, he searches for the limits of the medium in a very individual way. After an expressionist period, he eventually arrived at a minimalist and decorative approach in the eighties.
Besides his appeal to something like a bygone collective memory, Fons Haagmans appears to be in search of the roots of representation. simplified, abstracted images like those from a school primer are applied to canvases that normally bear a rather refined, distinguished form of painting. Haagmans rides roughshod over 'High Art' and prefers to assume the guise of a house painter. He has had a great influence on other artists. Haagmans has also had quite an influence on the younger generations, through his work as a teacher at the Rijksacademie and the Jan van Eyck Academie.
The Bonnefantenmuseum has followed Fons Haagmans intensively since 1986 and now has fifteen of his paintings and thirty works on paper in the collection.


Jan Dibbets (1941, Weert)

He is completely preoccupied with visible reality and its visual transformation. We do so like to believe our own eyes. But as early as 1967, Jan Dibbets revealed through his perspective corrections the discrepancy between what we perceive and what is actually there. The fact that precisely this deceit assumes the form of a mature work of art and is elevated to the realm of true aesthetics is enough to make that grande dame of art, painting, blush. He stretches the deceit even further and transports it to the heights of great beauty. The fact that he uses a 'popular' medium like photography doesn't make it any better. After all, wasn't it photography that had plotted the death of painting in the nineteenth century?
From 1965 to 1967, he painted works that could pass as shaped canvases. They have a relief-like appearance to their geometric form, in which the perspectival effect is manifestly present. The urge to create a really concrete form of painting without 'side effects' made him decide to merely pile up various monochrome paintings on the floor, or next to each other against the wall. Though this completes the desecration of painting.
After Mondriaan, Jan Dibbets is the only 20th-century Dutch artist represented in most of the major museum collections worldwide. He has had large retrospectives in Europe and the United States.


Han van Wetering (1948, Maastricht)

All the works in the room are entitled Sint Fiet, which is the unusual name of the owner/collector, who is named after the early Christian martyr from Sicily, Saint Vitus (Sankt Vith). Closer inspection of the statues, however, soon leads to the conclusion that they concern a saint who has gone off the rails. Devotional thoughts are barely addressed. These Sint Fieten are such hedonists that there remains no time for 'higher', or even 'better' thoughts.

The sculptor Han van Wetering is an artist whose work is regularly exhibited in the museum. This time it is neither a presentation from the collection nor an exhibition, but rather a small overview of a completed project about Sint Fiet, which was previously shown at the home of Mr and Mrs Van Sint Fiet, who are both collectors. They are now also the owners of all these works. The reason for doing this presentation all over again is partly the generous gesture of the couple and partly that of the artist, as in this series he displays his versatility as never before. Moreover, it is a project that deserves to remain together, for the sake of the strong relationship between these Sint Fiets. Although all the works are extremely diverse in form and material, in letter and spirit they are one; brother and sister, as it were. And they present an unparalleled demonstration of the outright individuality of this artist. One statue evokes the other in a stream of associations (aus einem Guss) in a way that is seldom seen. The museum is very fortunate to be able to remove these works from the private domain for a few months and show them to a wider public.