Discover Benelux | Art Feature | Mauritshuis Exhibition
Left: It has been two years since the reopening of the Mauritshuis in the The Hague. Photo: © Ivo Hoekstra/Mauritshuis, The Hague. Top right: Emilie Gordenker, Director Mauritshuis. Photo: Frank van der Burg/Mauritshuis, The Hague. Below right: Brazilian artist Vik Muniz displays recreations of the more ‘intimate’ sides of masterpieces in his Verso collection. Photo: Ivo Hoekstra
What lies behind: A rediscovery of Dutch icons TEXT: ISA HEMPHREY
In 2005, Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa was given a new home in the Salle des Etats room of the Louvre. The four-year-long, four-million-pound refurbishment saw the painting hung behind unbreakable glass that protects it from changes in temperature, camera flashes and general damage. Viewers cannot get up close to the painting as it is cordoned off, under constant surveillance and only comes down once a year for maintenance. What the back of the painting looks like, or indeed that of any heavily guarded masterpiece, may not cross the mind of many. Yet the latest additions to Vik Muniz’s Verso collection, currently on show at the Mauritshuis in The Hague, allows viewers to peek at what he believes is their most intimate side.
renowned Brazilian artist Vik Muniz. “One of the things we've been doing with our exhibition programme is looking for ways to rediscover our permanent collection,” she says. “And people who can enter into an intelligent dialogue with our collection and the history of our building.” Known for his powerful imagery using everyday materials, the artist from São Paulo likes to challenge his audience. The 2010 documentary Waste Land depicted his journey to the world’s largest landfill in Brazil and showed the transformative power of art using materials we consider useless. Verso is yet another one of Muniz’s extraordinary collaborations. “It's a departure from my work, but my process is to reveal the process behind images, to make images more than what they seem to be,” he says.
For the Mauritshuis’ first contemporary exhibition, the museum’s director Emilie Gordenker chose internationally
The Verso collection, which is 15 years in the making, displays recreations of the backs of masterpieces. At the beginning,
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when Muniz first saw the back of Woman Ironing by Picasso, he describes it like “when you're with somebody that you know very well and that person's naked”. What started as photographs became an almost Herculean trial in modelmaking, with Muniz and his team reconstructing every texture, dimension, stamp, label, handwriting, bracket, scratch and dent of the backs of the most famous paintings in the world. This, the artist hopes, gives these recognisable icons a new layer of mystery. “It's like a game for children,” says Muniz. “Most people know these works already, they don't need an image to be guided by it, but to create this connection between the back and the front is quite interesting.” The Mauritshuis’ exhibition displays the back of The Anatomy Lesson of Dr Nicolaes Tulp by Rembrandt, The Goldfinch by Carel Fabritius, View of Delft and Girl with a Pearl Earring by Johannes