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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October 3, 2016

Help! My mammoth takes up too much space

Filed under: Animals,History,Weird by Orangemaster @ 11:04 am

Online auction site Catawiki has all kinds of stuff up for grabs, and as of last weekend, there’s a Dutch person selling off a complete mammoth skeleton.

According to the auction site, there are seven complete mammoth skeletons in the Netherlands, and this was the only one not owned by a museum. Originally found in the North Sea, the bones are not from the same mammoth, and were carefully collected over time. The skeleton is 3.2 metres high and 5.5 metres long, with 270 bones and two tusks that are three metres long.

Catawiki expects the skeleton to fetch between 200,000 and 260,000 euro. As of last weekend the highest bid was 35,000 euro.

UPDATE: A German museum that wishes to remain anonymous has bought the skeleton for 120,000 euro.

(Link: nos.nl, Photo: Wolfgang Staudt, some rights reserved)

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