Render image of the central avenue, as seen from the indoor harbour. Image courtesy of Celine Laurand for Drift Museum, Amsterdam
Press conference at the new headquarters of “Atelier Néerlandais” in Paris : must see exhibitions (Anselm Kieffer, Monet, Renoir, Charley Toorop), opening of new museums (FENIX, National photography museum)… upcoming highlights !
Amsterdam : Opening of DRIFT museum
In 2025 the Drift Museum will open its doors in the historical factory halls Van Gendt Hallen, that are currently being renovated. The industrial character of the Van Gendt Hallen will enhance DRIFT’s space-filling artworks and kinetic installations. The design of the Drift Museum is done by zU- studio: an international architectural office based in Amsterdam, founded by Javier Zubiria in 2015.
After years of vacancy, the monumental Van Gendt Hallen 13,300 m2 building is being renovated sustainably and innovatively at the initiative of Eduard Zanen. After renovation the complex will measure over 20.000 m2. Drift Museum will be a space that aims to offer a new kind of museum experience. The founders of DRIFT have been working at the intersection of art and technology since 2007.
Rotterdam : opening of FENIX Museum and National Photography Museum
Fenix, the first museum in the world to explore themes around migration through the lens of art, will open to the public on a landmark site in Rotterdam’s City Harbour onFriday16 May2025. Fenix will be located in a restored historic warehouse, which has been transformed in a radical design by Ma Yansongof MAD Architects, the internationally acclaimed Beijing-based architecture practice. It is the centre piece of the regeneration of the harbour-side neighbourhood of Katendrecht, which is Rotterdam’s former red light district and the oldest Chinatown of continental Europe. The 16,000 sqmbuilding, dating from 1923, was once part of the largest warehouse in the world and served as an important building for storage and shipping for the Holland America Line –a Dutch cargo and passenger line. The Holland America Line facilitated the journeys of millions of migrants in the 19thand 20thcenturies who arrived and departed from the surrounding docks.
Fenix is the first cultural project in Europe designed by MAD architects. Visitors will immediately see its architectural masterpiece, the Tornado, an organic, dynamic structure evocative of rising air. This double-helix staircase climbs from the ground floor and flows up and out of the rooftop onto a viewing platform hovering above the city. The inaugural collection exhibition, All Directions: Art That Moves You, will showcase150 artworks and objects ranging from the historical to the contemporary, drawn from the Fenix collection and acquired over the past five years.
Accompanying these works will be a collection of personal mementos, gathered from the people of Rotterdam and telling individual stories of migration, alongside important historical artefacts such as a section of the Berlin Wall.
National Museum of Photography – front view
© Photo Studio Hans Wilschut
Opening of NATIONAL MUSEUM OF PHOTOGRAPHY in transformed historic building
The National Museum of Photography – the nation’s centre for the display, conservation, collection and study of photography in the Netherlands – will move to a newly renovated warehouse in the heart of Rotterdam’s historic dock area.
Opening in the second half of 2025, the monumental eight-storey building will include extensive exhibition spaces, a photography bookshop and library, an education centre, community spaces, a museum café, a darkroom for professional photographers and amateurs alike, and a rooftop restaurant with panoramic views of the Rotterdam skyline.
At the core of the building, a suite of new climate-controlled facilities will house the Museum’s collection and conservation centre. Glass walls will allow visitors to observe the collection and atelier spaces, with specialists working behind the scenes in areas such as restoration and conservation.
The acquisition of the new building fulfils the National Museum of Photography’s longstanding commitment to developing an accessible and dynamic meeting place and an international platform for Dutch photography.
The work of the Museum, including its exhibitions and public programme, centres around its collection.
The collection presents an ever-growing record of Dutch photographic history, from the earliest daguerreotype dated 1842 to prints by some of the most exciting contemporary photographers working today, such as Dana Lixenberg, Erwin Olaf and Jaya Pelupessy. It includes one or more works by over 1,900 photographers. Setting the collection apart are more than 175 whole photography archives by renowned Dutch photographers such as Ed van der Elsken, Augusta Curiel, Cas Oorthuys and Esther Kroon, including a vast quantity of negatives and slides.
Anselm Kiefer, presented jointly at the VAN GOGH MUSEUM and STEDELIJK MUSEUM (Amsterdam)
For the first time in their history, the Van Gogh Museum and the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam are joining forces to stage the exhibition Anselm Kiefer – Sag mir wo die Blumen sind, which will run from 7 March – 9 June 2025.
The exhibition brings together twenty-five works by Anselm Kiefer, including paintings, installations, film and works on paper, across the two museums. The presentation at the Van Gogh Museum will demonstrate the enduring influence of Vincent van Gogh on Kiefer’s work. In 1963, Kiefer won a travel scholarship and chose to follow the route taken by Van Gogh, from the Netherlands to Belgium and France. Van Gogh and his work have remained a vital source of inspiration for him. The exhibition presents seven key works by Van Gogh, alongside previously unseen paintings and thirteen early drawings by Kiefer. Paintings, such as Van Gogh’s Wheatfield With Crows (1890) will be juxtaposed in the same space as Keifer’s monumental works of the same theme.
https://www.vangoghmuseum.nl/fr/programmez-votre-visite
The presentation at the Stedelijk Museum focuses on Kiefer’s close ties to the Netherlands, particularly the artist’s connection with the museum, which has been pivotal to his career. The Stedelijk acquired Innenraum (1981) and Märkischer Sand (1982) early in the artist’s practice and staged an acclaimed solo exhibition of his work in 1986. This exhibition is not only an unprecedented opportunity to see all the works in the Stedelijk’s collection together, but also a chance to see Kiefer’s more recent paintings and especially two new spatial installations. The titular work Sag mir wo die Blumen sind is a 24-metre-long painterly installation, which the artist is currently completing to fill the space around the historic staircase of the museum. The second installation Steigend, steigend, sinke nieder is made from photographs and lead, an important material that recurs throughout Kiefer’s work, alluding to the heavy weight of human history. The exhibition will also feature films by and about Anselm Kiefer, including the unknown film Noch ist Polen nicht los…(1989), which he made in Warsaw shortly before the fall of the Iron Curtain.
Kunsthal Rotterdam
Alessandra Sanguinetti. The Adventures of Guille and Belinda
15 February – 9 June 2025 | HALL 4
For over twenty years, Magnum photographer Alessandra Sanguinetti (1968, New York) has been following the lives of the Argentinian cousins Guillermina Aranciaga and Belinda Stutz. What began as a chance encounter on a ranch near Buenos Aires in 1999 evolved into a long-term photographic project in which Sanguinetti captures the dreams, struggles, and harsh realities of the girls’ rural lives. The exhibition ‘The Adventures of Guille and Belinda’ showcases Sanguinetti’s poetic,imaginative, and compelling work through nearly fifty photographs.
Haegue Yang: Leap Year
1 March – 31 August 2025 | HALL 2
Leap Year is the first major retrospective exhibition of South-Korean artist Haegue Yang in the Netherlands. Spanning a thirty-year period, Yang’s work includes installation, photography, video, and sound art. She uses everyday objects like venetian blinds, fans, and bells to create poetic sculptures. Her work explores themes like migration, identity, and cultural exchange. Inspired by folk art and modernism, Yang’s work combines personal and societal issues to create a multi-sensory experience.
The exhibition is realised in collaboration with Hayward Gallery in London and Migros Museum in Zurich.
https://www.kunsthal.nl/en/#tijdlijn
Kröller-Müller Museum : Charley Toorop. Love for Van Gogh
Even though Charley Toorop’s work has an originality and power all its own, this doesn’t mean that she did not have an eye for the work of other artists. On the contrary. Toorop admired the painting of Bart van der Leck and Piet Mondriaan, but also foreign contemporaries such as Georges Braque, Pablo Picasso and Fernand Léger. However, there is one artist whom she believes – even more than her father Jan Toorop – was at the inception of her artistic practice and whom she has admired all her life: Vincent van Gogh. For her, his work was ‘the breakthrough to a new world’ (Vincent van Gogh 1853–1953, exh.cat. Kröller-Müller Museum / Stedelijk Museum, February 1953).
Charley Toorop’s admiration for Vincent van Gogh is illustrated on the basis of several themes, including her self-depiction as an artist and as a human being, her pilgrimage to the Borinage, her travels to Paris and the south of France, her social commitment and her attitude towards people and nature.
From 24 May to 14 September 2025
HUIS Marseille (Amsterdam) : A journey through Belle Époque Paris
From February 15 to June 22, 2025, the Museum of Photography Huis Marseille (Amsterdam) invites the public to discover a selection of 72 original large-format prints by the Séeberger brothers, successful French amateur photographers.
The exhibition “Revoir Paris. Paris dans l’objectif des frères Séeberger (1900-1907)” brings together images taken during four photography competitions organized by the city of Paris in the early 20th century, from the collections of the Musée Carnavalet – Histoire de Paris. They reveal the beginnings of street photography, and have never before been shown in such large numbers. Sixteen prints making the journey to Huis Marseille were rediscovered in the attic of the Paris museum in 2017.
The three Séeberger brothers are Jules (1872-1932) and his younger brothers Henri (1876-1956) and Louis (1874-1946). They depict the capital’s emblematic sites, such as the banks of the Seine, the Montmartre hill, the Marais hotels, the Jardin des Plantes and the Jardin du Luxembourg, as well as forgotten places like the Cours de la Bièvre, all bustling with Parisians. Following a chronological and thematic itinerary, the exhibition at the Huis Marseille museum in Amsterdam recreates the Paris of the belle époque through the eyes of the Séebergers, who captured the atmosphere of the capital better than anyone on the eve of the Great War.