From April 19 to May 25, 2025, Pictura will host the exhibition "The Beauty of Our Country. This exhibition analyzes how the deeply rooted urge of people to band together takes on more grotesque and violence-saturated forms today than ever before. This is illuminated through photographs, collages, spatial work and drawings by Luuk Wilmering, Otto Snoek and Ronald Cornelissen. Frank Vande Veire has written an essay that connects to the themes of the exhibition without commenting on the artworks presented.
In his collages, Luuk Wilmering explores how an idealized past influences our current social and political landscape. The exhibition features several of his works. The beauty of our country is taken from a book series from the 1950s and 1960s, for which Cas Oorthuys took photographs. Wilmering interwove two volumes from it: Architecture of this Century, which shows the dream of progress, and Costumes, which highlights disappearing traditions. His spatial work Double Dutch Dollhouse presents two contemporary dollhouses that playfully reference 18th-century dollhouses. This work contains a variety of historic Dutch interiors, but on the floors are oriental carpets. What is "ours" and what is "theirs"? And who decides? Another series is Amsterdam Royal Palace. The people who populate the halls of the Royal Palace in this work come from the photo book De reis door den Indischen Archipel, published by Prince Leopold II of Belgium in 1928. The overwhelming income from profits in the former Dutch East Indies greatly enabled the prosperity of the Netherlands.
Otto Snoek is a documentary photographer whose field of work primarily includes the city. In this exhibition, he presents his group portraits captured during such diverse events as shopping Sundays, soccer parties, street parades, millionaire and art fairs and museum openings. What distinguishes these photographs from the work of many other street photographers is their radical aesthetic and thematic focus on how our modern democracy drives the individual to make spectacle of himself. The result is a collection of images that almost without exception show a confrontational, unabashed reality - joyless and uncompromising in the immoderation they exude.
Ronald Cornelissen shows drawings from the Animal Farm series. The drawings feature a rooster and a pig wandering past a series of farms in the 12 provinces of our country. The farms in these drawings are all based on photographs from the archives of the National Cultural Heritage Agency whose mission, as they say themselves, is to give the future a past and the past a future. Cultural heritage tells us where we came from and gives us a foothold, according to the State Department. That footing, however, seems to be hard to find in the Netherlands in recent years, and ideologues of certain political persuasions are cleverly capitalizing on that. With this series of drawings, Cornelissen sheds light on the back of the myths surrounding the countryside, which have been grotesquely cultivated.
In his essay, Frank Vande Veire attempts to describe the damage caused by our desire for identity. His contribution appears as a booklet to accompany the exhibition.
Please note! Pictura is closed on Mondays and Tuesdays.
