April 22, 2020

Artist paints on toilet paper, strings it up in Utrecht

Filed under: Art by Orangemaster @ 4:58 pm

Currently stranded in The Netherlands due to the Coronavirus crisis, American artist Daniel Miller, 33, has recently been painting tulips on toilet paper and hanging it around Utrecht. He needed to get something artistic out of his system, something ‘positive and absurd’, he said, and tulips on loo roll definitely qualifies.

On his art you can read the text “If you see me, you can take me”, in Dutch. Free art – we love free stuff in this country! He’s a quick study.

Daniel came to The Netherlands to get inspired and visit friends, but one hour after he landed, the Corona measures kicked in and he was destined to hang out with us a while longer.

Every day Daniel goes around town and hangs up his painted toilet paper tulips, hoping to bring some hope and happiness to people. “The Coronavirus is unavoidable. What surprises me is our reaction to it. How we blame each other, how we panic and come up with conspiracy theories.”

Be sure to check him out on instagram.

(Link: rtvutrecht.nl)

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March 11, 2020

Van Gogh goes for 15 million euro in Maastricht

Filed under: Art,History by Orangemaster @ 4:36 pm

‘Peasant woman in front of a farmhouse’ (‘Paysanne devant une chaumière’ in French), an 1885 work by Vincent van Gogh that was bought back in the 1960s in the UK for about 5 euro, just sold for 15 million euro at the world’s premier art fair TEFAF in Maastricht, Limburg.

It’s one of those stories were someone had left the painting in a cellar for years until a local antique merchant bought it at an auction for next to nothing. One year later, the painting was sold to a journalist for about 53 euro; he showed it the Tate Gallery director and it was deemed to be a Van Gogh. The journalist then auctioned it off in 1970 at Sotheby’s in New York City where it fetched USD 110.000 (97.455 euro).

In 2001 the work was sold for the last time at Sotheby’s for 1.5 million euro. Today, at 15 million euro, it’s the most expensive artwork ever sold at the TEFAF, although not all sales at the annual event are made public.

(Link: ad.nl, image artnet.com)

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February 12, 2020

Dutch artist tattoos 6673 people for international artwork

Filed under: Art by Orangemaster @ 12:38 pm

Artist Sander van Bussel of Tilburg Cowboys came up with the Human Rights Tattoo in 2012 after the death of friend and human rights activist Steven ‘Nyash’ Nyagah from Kenya.

Being the largest, most profound living work of art to date, Human Rights Tattoo aims to give the Declaration a universal voice on a human level and daily basis.

The Human Rights Tattoo features the Universal Declaration of Human Rights letter for letter on 6773 people worldwide. Every individual gets one letter, and there’s currently some 2500 letters to go. There’s also a website that functions as a place where all the tattooed folks can talk to each other and share information.

(Links: fonkonline.nl, info.humanrightstattoo.org, Photo of Dragon tattoo by Deanna Wardin, some rights reserved)

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November 14, 2019

Van Gogh painting finds its way back home

Filed under: Art,History by Orangemaster @ 9:00 pm

An early Vincent Van Gogh painting was recently bought for 2.8 million euro at Sotheby’s in New York City by the Amsterdam’s Van Gogh Museum together with the Drents Museum in Assen, Drenthe. The auction house has estimated the painting would fetch a mere 650,000. but considering the price that was paid, there’s was quite a bit of interesting in acquiring the painting. The money used to buy the painting comes from funds and lotteries, which acts as art subsidies.

Experts claim that there are only five Van Gogh artworks from his ‘Drenthe period’ and now they are all in the Netherlands. The Van Gogh Museum had three of them, and the Drentse Museum had one. The newly acquired painting, ‘Onkruid verbrandende boer’ (roughly ‘Farmer Burning Weeds’), will be exhibited back and forth between the two museums.

(Link and image: trouw.nl)

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September 25, 2019

NEMO Science Museum gets huge Hofman statue

Filed under: Art by Orangemaster @ 4:16 pm

The NEMO Science Museum in downtown Amsterdam has recently bought and installed a 8.5-meter-high statue by Dutch artist Florentijn Hofman.

It wasn’t easy to install: the artwork, A Handstand, modelled after Hofman’s 11-year-old son, took 20 people to install and acts as a centrepiece for the museum and its new exhibition, Humania, about humans, to open on 23 November. Only then will people be able to admire the artwork in person.

A Handstand shows the world upside down. Made of lycra, the skeleton can be see on the outside as a costume, while the child is inside (not the real one). There’s also a lot of detail in the muscles and bones of the body, so that it really looks like how a boy would tense his muscles when doing a handstand. The whole thing weighs 400 kilos and needed four stories of space indoors to be able to install it properly.

(Link: nemosciencemuseum.nl, Photo: parool.nl)

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June 26, 2019

Dutchmen want to pick up plastic on the Moon

Filed under: Art,Science by Orangemaster @ 8:26 pm

Former bin collector Arnout Schaap and graphic designer Jorick de Quaasteniet want to go into space… to collect plastic. One plastic bag to be exact.

While there are millions of bits of space junk floating around the Earth and damaging satellites, there is also a lot of ordinary stuff like toothbrushes, cameras, Elon Musk’s car, and a whole lot of plastic. Schaap and Quaasteniet have a plan to pick up one of the plastic bags. Yes, just one. It is the cover of a device that astronauts used to measure the distance between the moon and the Earth in 1969 during the Apollo program.

NASA was able to bring astronauts back from space, but not plastic. Moon Mission 2030, the name of the Dutch project, is going to do something about it. Their current plan is to build a small robot to go and pick it up. It would be built with the help of students of many ages. The general idea is to have their small robot ready once astronauts will be ready to go back to the Moon in the not too dist future.

Do read the interview in Dutch in the link below.

(Link and image: vice.com)

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June 17, 2019

World’s oldest X-ray images found in Dutch museum

Filed under: Art,Dutch first,Science by Orangemaster @ 10:15 pm

While looking through old documents, as you do when you work in a museum, employees of the Teyler Museum in Haarlem, North Holland made a great discovery: they found a set of the oldest X-ray images in the world. As far as they know, there’s only another set somewhere in London.

The images were part of the inheritance of Nobel Prize winner Hendrik Antoon Lorentz, and printed by him. Time Magazine called these some of the 100 most influential photos ever collected. One of the images features German-Dutch physicist Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen’s wife Bertha’s hand. “I’ve seen my death!” Bertha Röntgen said.

The Teyler Museum will be exposing these photos until July 14.

(Link: teylersmuseum.nl, Photo of Teylers Museum by Tom Clearwood, some rights reserved)

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May 24, 2019

Man with Night Watch tattoo sees real artwork

Filed under: Art by Orangemaster @ 3:25 pm

Stefan-Kasper

Fifty-one-year-old Dutchman Marko Bak from Nieuw-Lekkerland, South Holland, who has Rembrandt’s The Night Watch tattooed on his back, and his tattoo artist Richard van Meerkerk both finally saw the artwork at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam for the very first time.

Bak said that he wasn’t a museum kind of guy, and that the tattoo was done as a bit of a joke, but then grew into a real art project. When Bak met Van Meerkerk, he told him “If ever you have nothing to do you, you can tattoo The Night Wacht on my back.” And that’s what happened.

The tattoo is not an exact copy, as some of the faces were replaced by ones from Bak’s friends and family. I can imagine that it’s not every day that someone shows up with The Night Wacht (aka Militia Company of District II under the Command of Captain Frans Banninck Cocq) on their back, making this quirky news.

And here’s the Dutch item on video:

(Link: nos.nl, Photo: Stefan Kasper’s instagram)

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May 21, 2019

New, international wall murals in Amsterdam East

Filed under: Art by Orangemaster @ 2:12 pm

Artists Kaspar van Leek, 35, from Studio Giftig and Niels van Swaemen, 37, painted one of the 10 wall murals that can be found in Amsterdam East on the Platanenweg. Their mural, 10 metres by 15 metres, depicts a floating woman surrounded by doves [scroll down a bit]. “The dove is a symbol for freedom and also for Amsterdam,” says Van Leek, while floating here represents complete freedom.

Amsterdam Street Art (ASA) had a hand in organising most of it, a collective that has been around for 10 years, pleading for the acceptance of street art as an art form.

Flat residents were asked for their opinion, something ASA makes a point of, and the art was created at the same time as renovations happened, the ideal time for something new. The only things the residents did not want was sex and anything morbid. Dan Kitchener, an artist from English who painted the wall mural in the photo above, went for a geisha, which doesn’t really fit the theme, but they made an exception for Kitchener.

The neighbourhood has been spruced up and why not visit it if you can.

(Link and photo: ad.nl)

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May 4, 2019

Big trompe l’oeil eye-catcher in Utrecht

Filed under: Art by Orangemaster @ 3:20 pm

Last month Dutch street artists Jan Is De Man and Deef Feed completed a large trompe l’oeil mural on the side of a residential building in Utrecht on the corner of Mimosastraat and Amsterdamsestraatweg. It depicts a big shelf of books on a three-story flat building, packed with a selection of their favourite books from their own collections. There’s one about Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones, Le Petit Prince and other Dutch and English books.

If you look closely, you can also see a few made-up titles featuring their own names.

(Link and photo: thisiscolossal.com)

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