 Location of the Art & Project gallery at the Prinsengracht from 1979 to 1989 | |
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| Origins | Founded in 1968 Dissolved in 2001 |
Key people | Geert van Beijeren & Adriaan van Ravesteijn (founders) |
Art & Project was a leading contemporary art gallery by Geert van Beijeren & Adriaan van Ravesteijn from 1968 to 2001 in Amsterdam and Slootdorp, the Netherlands, as well as an influential art magazine published by the gallery between 1968 and 1989.
The Amsterdam gallery Art & Project, led by Geert van Beijeren & Adriaan van Ravesteijn, opened in September 1968 in Van Ravesteijn's [1] parental home in Richard Wagnerstraat in Amsterdam-Zuid. The first exhibition was with German artist Charlotte Posenenske and the second was about the Dutch architect and design duo Jan Slothouber and William Pars Graatsma. This drew some attention due to the first two Art & Project Bulletins, a hundredfold of them send nationwide. [2] The early focus was on architectural research and other early exhibitors included Gruppe X, Paul Schuitema and Aldo van den Nieuwelaar. [3]
Initially the gallery was open only during evening hours and weekends; later also in the afternoon. No invitations were sent; there were no vernissages. Also in 1968, the first issue of Art & Project Bulletin appeared, a magazine through which the gallery built an artistic network and enabled artists to have "exhibitions by mail". In the first years they brought about six exhibitions a year. [4]
From May 1969 onward, the gallery focused on conceptual artists, such as Stanley Brouwn, Daniel Buren, Jan Dibbets, Gilbert & George, Douglas Huebler, Sol LeWitt and Lawrence Weiner. [5] In March 1970, Gilbert & George repeated in Van Beijeren and Van Ravesteijn's gallery their famous Posing on Stairs performance as living statues at the Stedelijk Museum a few months earlier.
Some examples of the type of works of the artists and artists presented at Art & Project in the Netherlands in the early years of the gallery.
In 1971 the gallery moved to Van Breestraat 18, close to the Stedelijk Museum and right opposite Riekje Swart's gallery, the other contemporary art gallery in Amsterdam with an international outlook. In 1973, Art & Project moved to nearby Willemsparkweg 36, where it would stay for the next six years.
In 1973 also, the gallery opened an art space in Antwerp in cooperation with the Brussels gallery MTL (led by Fernand Spillemaeckers). In this gallery, named Art & Project / MTL, eleven solo exhibitions were staged in 1973 and 1974. Other galleries that Van Beijeren and Van Ravesteijn were in close contact with, included Konrad Fischer in Düsseldorf, Yvonne Lambert in Paris, Sperone in Turin, Jack Wendler in London and Claire Copley in Los Angeles. [6]
From 1979 until 1989 the gallery was based at Prinsengracht 785, after which it moved to Slootdorp, a remote village in the North of the Netherlands. The gallery closed in December 2001. Geert van Beijeren died a few years later.
For more than 30 years, Art & Project was one of the Netherlands' major platforms of contemporary art. From the start of the gallery, it supported an international group of artists that was mostly associated with Minimal Art, Conceptual Art and Land Art.
The following artists were involved with the gallery (and the bulletin): Barry Flanagan, Douglas Huebler, Lawrence Weiner, Sol LeWitt, Robert Barry, Carl Andre, Alan Charlton (artist), Joseph Kosuth, Richard Long, Andrew Lord, Stanley Brouwn, David Tremlett, Gilbert & George, Alighiero Boetti, Francesco Clemente, Allen Ruppersberg, Marcel Broodthaers, John Baldessari, Hamish Fulton, Jan Dibbets, Ian Wilson, Bas Jan Ader, Han Schuil and Daniel Buren.
Among the gallery's clients were important art collectors in the Netherlands and Belgium such as Edy de Wilde (director Stedelijk Museum, 1963-1985), Benno Premsela, Martin and Mia Visser, Frits and Agnes Becht, Herman and Nicole Daled, and Anton and Annick Herbert. [7]
Between September 1968 and November 1989 Geert van Beijeren & Adriaan van Ravesteijn published 156 bulletins of the influential art magazine Art & Project. The first magazines were merely announcements of upcoming exhibitions in the Art & Project gallery. Later editions more and more took the form of art objects.
Art & Project was meant to be a monthly magazine but was not always published regularly (17 in 1972; only 8 in 1973). Between June 1983 and December 1984 no magazines were published at all. The magazine was printed in The Hague by printshop Delta in an edition of 800. The format was generally A3, which was folded and thus formed four A4 pages. It was generally printed black ink on white paper. In some cases the standard format was abandoned, for example:
The magazine was distributed free of charge to about 400 addresses (mainly of artists, galleries and curators). The remainder of each edition could be picked up at the gallery in Amsterdam. In some cases distribution (and even printing) took place in other cities:
Along with the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam and Gallery Riekje Swart, Art & Project was a centre for renewal of contemporary art in the Netherlands and in Europe from the late 1960s until its closing down in 2001. The gallery's reputation helped to establish the city of Amsterdam as "an international nexus of intense art activities" in the 1960s and 70s. [8] Several museums and galleries have dedicated exhibitions commemorating the Art & Project legacy. In 2003/04, an exhibition on the role of Art & Project took place at the Musee d'art moderne et contemporain in Geneva. In 2009, the Museum of Modern Art in New York City organized an exhibition named "In & Out of Amsterdam" with mainly works that had been donated to the museum by Van Beijeren and Van Ravesteijn in 2007. [9] In 2010, an international symposium took place in Wiels, a centre for contemporary art in Brussels, focusing on the role of the galleries MTL (Brussels) and Art & Project (Amsterdam).
Van Beijeren and Van Ravesteijn, during more than 30 years collecting, acquired an impressive art collection that during the 1990s and 2000s has gradually found its way to various Dutch museums, as well as New York's MoMa. Original Art & Project bulletins have become much sought-after documents. The gallery's archive, as well as the couple's personal archive, measuring 92 meters, has been donated to the Rijksdienst voor het Cultureel Erfgoed (RCE), the Dutch national heritage organisation, and will be accessible to the public from 2014 onward. [10]
The Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, colloquially known as the Stedelijk, is a museum for modern art, contemporary art, and design located in Amsterdam, Netherlands.
Solomon "Sol" LeWitt was an American artist linked to various movements, including conceptual art and minimalism.
Lawrence Charles Weiner was an American conceptual artist. He was one of the central figures in the formation of conceptual art in the 1960s. His work often took the form of typographic texts, a form of word art.
The Rijksmuseum Twenthe in Enschede, the Netherlands, was founded in 1927 by textile industry Baron Jan Bernard Van Heek. He donated his own private collection and the museum building to the government, thus making it a national museum. The museum is situated in the quarter of Roombeek, 10 minutes on foot north-east from the railway station.
Douglas Huebler was an American conceptual artist.
Josephine Gail Baer is an American painter associated with minimalist art. She began exhibiting her work at the Fischbach Gallery, New York, and other venues for contemporary art in the mid-1960s. In the mid-1970s, she turned away from non-objective painting. Since then, Baer has fused images, symbols, words, and phrases in a non-narrative manner, a mode of expression she once termed "radical figuration." She lives and works in Amsterdam, Netherlands.
Jan Dibbets is an Amsterdam-based Dutch conceptual artist. His work is influenced by mathematics and works mainly with photography.
Willem Adriaan van Ravesteijn was a Dutch gallerist and art collectors in the Netherlands. He and Geert van Beijeren founded the leading Dutch art gallery Art & Project (1968–2001) and publishers of the art magazine of the same name (1968–1989). During its thirty-year existence, the gallery as well as the magazine made substantial contributions to the Dutch art climate.
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Daniël (Daan) van Golden was a Dutch artist, who has been active as a painter, photographer, collagist, installation artist, wall painter and graphic artist. He is known for his meticulous paintings of motives and details of everyday life and every day images.
Geert van Beijeren was a Dutch gallerist at Art & Project, curator and art collectors in the Netherlands, known with Adriaan van Ravesteijn for their pioneering role in the field of conceptual art in the Netherlands.
Andrew Lord is an English artist based in New York, primarily known for ceramics and drawings. In a 2010 monograph on the occasion of his exhibition at the Milton Keynes Gallery, Dawn Adès commented that his sculpture, informed by painting, ceramics, poetry, the natural world and the city, exemplifies, "The centrality of material things to memory, experience, associations."
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Stanley Edmund Brouwn was a Suriname-born Dutch conceptual artist. His works explored dematerialization. He exemplified 1960s conceptualism. His best-known works include this way brouwn, Afghanistan-Zambia, and BROUWNTOYS 4000AD.
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