upcoming

Art fair Art Noord V

28 September to 1 October 2023

Fifth edition of the Northern Netherlands art fair Art Noord with the participation of mainly Frisian, Groningen and Drenthe galleries and art dealers.

Zoltin Peeter 
Beyond the North

7 October 2023 – 31 January 2024 (west wing) 

After his education at the Amsterdam Rijksakademie, Zoltin Peeter (1942-2019) became one of the most important artists of his generation with his monumental etchings and spatial work. After a stay in Antwerp, he decided to settle in the Frisian countryside in order to concentrate on his work in peace, far from the major art centers.

It became his base for many trips to even more northern regions, such as Iceland and Norway.

He captured the many impressions of imposing mountain ranges, plains, coastal strips and waterfalls in concise sketches, which later became the starting point for medium-sized and large drawings in his studio.

In his drawings he brings together divergent abstracted motifs into completely new worlds in which lines, shapes and planes mainly create space. In the exhibition Zoltin Peeter – Betekend de Ruimte (Means the Space), a wide selection of his large drawings is shown in conjunction with works by artist friends and works from the collection of Museum Belvédère.

Zoltin Peeter received the Gerrit Benner Prize for visual arts in 2010. The first preparations for the exhibition in Museum Belvédère were made with him while he was still alive.

Mikalojus Konstantina Ciurlionis

Beyond Heaven and Earth

24 February - 9 June 2024 (east wing)

Mikalojus Konstantinas Čiurlionis (1875-1911) is the most important visual artist and composer from Lithuania. Due to the isolation of the country for many decades, his work in the west remained unknown for a long time. It was only after the independence of the Baltic states in 1990 that his work was rediscovered internationally. Major exhibitions in Germany, France, Japan, the United States, England and Belgium, among others, gave him the place in the canon of European modern art that he deserves.

“Compare it with Norway: suppose you put painter Edvard Munch and composer Edvard Grieg together in one person, then you have a nice idea.” –Pianist Rokas Zubovas (1966)

Museum Belvédère is the first museum in the Netherlands to dedicate a retrospective to the work of this Lithuanian master.

Beyond Heaven and Earth

At the beginning of the last century, Čiurlionis developed his own symbolic style, drawing on Lithuanian sagas, myths, fairy tales and folk beliefs as well as non-Western cultures, ranging from Ancient Egyptian, Indian to Asian. Using the drawing as a basis, Čiurlionis made many tempera paintings in which secrets are evoked and the earthly world is connected to the supernatural.

Instead of reality – as we (re)know it – he depicted a different world with his work. This depiction of unprecedented images and worlds is a common thread through his work. He was never concerned with abstractions, but with the mentally imaginable.