Robert Gober, Untiteled, 2006, Bronze, Photo credit: Andrew Rogers, Courtesy of the artist.

Robert Gober, Untiteled, 2005-2006, Cast lead crystal and paint, Photo credit: Courtesy of the artist and Matthew Marks Gallery.

Museum Boijmans
Van Beuningen
Museumpark 18-20
+31 (0)10 44.19.400
Rotterdam
The Newest Collection
Permanent collection
augmented with loans
October 31, 2009-February 7, 2010

Curators at Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen reflect on the museum's contemporary art collection in public. The museum is showing the surreal perceptual world of six modern artists in six galleries. Items from the collection are augmented with loans.

Work by Robert Gober, Sarah Lucas, Daan van Golden, Helena van der Kraan, Maria Roosen and Sharon Lockhart are exhibited. The museum has been following these national and international artists for many years and now presents past purchases alongside loans from the artists. This outlines the future direction of the collection and enables the museum to evaluate its own art purchases.

Each artist has their own room and some 50 works altogether will be on show. Loans have come from Robert Gober, Helena van der Kraan and others. The objects differ in the use of materials and style and also in the periods in which they were created. The artists transform everyday objects by executing them in unusual materials. They all draw inspiration from intimacy, the immediate environment and everyday life.

Work by Gober (1954) includes a cast wax lower body, Untitled (torso), in the museum collection. In a response to the film L’argent de poche (1976) by the French director François Truffaut, artist Sharon Lockhart (1964) took photographs in which young children act out the film’s intimate kissing scene. Provocative and humorous photographs, collages and sculptures by Sarah Lucas (1962), one of the rebellious Young British Artists of the 1990s, are on display. Roosen (1957), Van der Kraan (1940) and Van Golden (1938), too, each have their own way of making something unusual out of the mundane.

Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen has more than 140,000 works of art, ranging from medieval arts and crafts and 17th-century paintings to modern design and contemporary installations. The collection up to around 1945 is on permanent display in Collection Two. Contemporary art can be seen in presentations like this, which is the second in a series.

Robert Gober, Hanging Man / Sleeping Man Wallpaper, Silkscreen on wallpaper. Photo credit: Courtesy of the artist.