De Stijl Centenary at Stedelijk Museum
Marking 100 years since the founding of the ground-breaking De Stijl movement are three exhibitions at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam.
“The cultivated man of today is gradually turning away from natural things, and his life is becoming more and more abstract,” wrote Piet Mondrian presciently in the first edition of De Stijl magazine, published by Theo van Doesburg in 1917. This year marks the centenary of the movement that celebrated plasticity and form in an endeavour for harmony; a movementthat – love or hate, agree or disagree – has had an indelible impact on art, design and architecture, theory and practice.
The extensive collection of the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam puts it in the position to stage three mega exhibitions over the course of 2017. Endeavouring to highlight unexpected angles on the well-trodden subject matter, the first exhibition pairs some of the most famous De Stijl works with other work from the collection by the likes of Isa Genzken, Bas aufblasbare rutsche kaufen Jan Ader and Roy Lichtenstein. Entitled De Stijl and the Stedeljik and running until May 27, this approach serves to explore the broader and on-going impact of the movement.
From April 8 to September 17, the Chris Beekman, De Stijl Defector exhibition will showcase the work of the lesser-known De Stijl artist who distinguished himself for his political activism. After the 1920s, Beekman rejected the group’s purely idealistic ethos, and fell in with the Russian movement of artists such as Kazimir Malevich, who sought concrete social engagement through abstraction.
The third exhibition focuses on the furniture, interior textiles, packaging and other design items that De Stijl artists created for the Amsterdam department store Metz & Co. Running from October 14 to January 28, a particular highlight will be the Zig-Zag furniture designs of Gerrit Rietveld.
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