Each visit to the Voorlinden Museum in The Hague renews the pleasure of the place, of the architecture, of the art. Just two hours from Brussels, we arrive, above The Hague, in the middle of the Wassenaar dunes, near the beach of Scheveningen. Since 2016, we can discover (and see again) a dream museum in a dream location. The museum, designed by Rotterdam architects Kraaijvanger, is of great purity, entirely at the service of the works. It is surrounded by a historic park of 40 hectares, planted with various trees, speckled with ponds where ducks frolic.
We have just added in the nearby dunes, two large towers made of reinforced concrete blocks, by Anselm Kiefer with lead pounds between the blocks. Towers of “Jericho” (the title of the work), destroyed, seeming to threaten to collapse, and rising up to 18 m high. They refer to the texts of Kabbalah. Kiefer sees a certain beauty in the ruins. He explains : “Ruins, like disasters or collapses, are moments where something can start again. In the universe, at every moment, a star is born or dies. ”
In the museum and in the large garden, until June 9, we discover a superb exhibition Alicja Kwade, artist living in Berlin, born in Poland in 1979, with installations that challenge our perceptions, often with humor. Works that create healthy doubt about what we think we know or understand.
The spinning rock
On fragile-looking chairs (but they are bronze!) or on thin structures, large rocks are placed. In the museum, she places a rock which rotates on itself in 24 hours in the opposite direction to the rotation of the Earth, canceling the effect of this rotation. It is therefore the only object that remains immobile in space.
Alicja Kwade covers the wall with thousands of sheets with all her DNA written on them. She creates a labyrinth of pendulum “winders”. In a room, she plays with our perceptions: when we think we can cross the room, a mirror suddenly appears. The gaze is alternately blocked or caught, it all depends on the point of view. The more the visitor loses himself in this labyrinth, the more he sees the perspectives multiply.
From June 29, another temporary exhibition will be offered dedicated to the hyperrealist sculptor Ron Mueck. The Voorlinden shows in its permanent rooms one of the public’s favorite works: an old couple sitting on the beach, under a parasol, reproduced to the millimeter, with all the hairs, cold sores and wrinkles. Except that their size is disproportionate and they are three times bigger than us.
A second exhibition (this one open until January 19) is proposed entitled “Cloudwalker” which begins with the performance of Abraham Poincheval walking on the clouds, clinging to a balloon!
Numerous works from the museum’s collection once again overwhelm our senses, making the foam arise, or plunging us into the “infinity mirror” of the star-filled sky of Yayoi Kusama. There are works by Ann Veronica Janssens and Michel François.
Don’t miss the major exhibition dedicated to the contemporary Belgian painter, Michael Borremans from November 30.
We can still see the strikingly beautiful video installation by Sam Taylor-Johnson who filmed on multiple screens surrounding the viewer, the BBC orchestra performing a contemporary composition but without the instruments: we only see their gestures related to music.
The magnificent Voorlinden museum reopens for our pleasure
In the permanent rooms we find “Open ended” by Richard Serra, in corten steel, a gigantic steel labyrinth weighing 216 tonnes. Next to it, Maurizio Cattelan’s tiny elevator, 30 cm high, but which functions like a real elevator with sliding doors and lights. James Turell built one of his “Sky spaces” there, a space of pure meditation where we sit looking above us at the sky and the passage of clouds. Five large opalescent “pools” by Roni Horn, each weighing 4.5 tonnes, are there, magical. It is glass gently cooled and mixed with rare pigments which give a luminous mauve, green, or pink color. They look like basins of water. Wonderful.
