During their career, Aldo and Hannie van Eyck were responsible for curating and designing twenty-three exhibitions. But while Van Eyck’s designs for the early Cobra exhibitions have become particularly celebrated and the 1952 Blue Purple Room (Stedelijk Museum) as well as the 1968 The Enigma of Vast Multiplicity (Milan Triennale) have gained an almost mythical status, very little is known about all the others. By analyzing the Van Eycks’ continued exhibition work, this research not only complements existing scholarship but also draws attention to the intentional combination of exhibitions and buildings in their practice, as a purposeful modus operandi to explore and manifest their ideas into various discursive fields.

Therefore, this research argues that the Van Eycks’ should be understood as artists with architectural tools as well as curator-designers who purposefully extended their ongoing experiments and preliminary studies into forms, proportions, colours and programming both in buildings and exhibitions. Ultimately, this research will demonstrate how for the van Eycks exhibitions, while moments of architectural thinking, experimenting and creating that have different boundaries than built work, are not hierarchically subordinated to buildings.

date

September 2019 -

Team

Jorn Konijn

Sergio M. Figueiredo

Bernard Colenbrander