"Up to now = Tot zo ver"
2003-04-17 until 2003-12-31
Stedelijk Museum
Amsterdam, , NL

A farewell presentation from the collection by Rudi Fuchs.  Actually, the Stedelijk should be closed for renovation. At the last minute the renovations were postponed and the Museum is still open. Turning a necessity into a virtue, for the first time in many years nearly the whole of the Stedelijk will be devoted to showing its own collection.

The presentation which is being assembled at the moment by departing director Rudi Fuchs and a number of the Museum's curators will include all of the disciplines in the collection. The emphasis lies on the postwar period, although many familiar (and less familiar) classic moderns will also be seen. By far and away the largest number of the galleries on the upper storey are being arranged by Fuchs himself. He opted for a somewhat polar approach in which realism and abstraction confront one another. Works by various artists will be brought into dialogue with each other in each gallery, but sometimes there will be a gallery between them devoted to one artist, such as Bruce Nauman.

Several very recent acquisitions are also being included in the presentation, such as the video project Bros (2001) by Liza May Post. A wall painting by the American Sol LeWitt, given to the Museum years ago by Carl Andre, will be specially installed in the Stedelijk for "Up To Now". In the four corner galleries of the upper storey playful groups of classic modern works are to be seen, including among them Chagall, Mondriaan and pre- and postwar expressionists.

In the other galleries the accent is on acquisitions from the period of Rudi Fuchs (1993-2002), but older work from the collection will also be abundantly present. Fuchs combines works by various artists, as well as various disciplines. Almost all the sculptural work by Willem de Kooning from the collection is being shown. The Museum's collection of photography and prints is being drawn on for the two series of cabinets. In the Print Cabinet itself will be found high points from the collection of works on paper. On the ground floor various curators are making a selection in which paintings, applied art, industrial design and photography will be more or less combined with one another. At Fuchs's request they will concentrate on the 1960s and '70s, because that period is of great interest among artists today. These galleries will draw on Pop Art and Hard Edge, hippy design, neo-constructivism and minimalist jewellery design, combined with seldom shown reportage photography by, for instance, Pieter Boersma (the riots over demolition for the Amsterdam subway) and Koen Wessing (Chile) from the collection.  

IMAGE
Sol LeWitt,
Wall Painting, 2003

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