Kunstinstituut Melly Archive

Item sets

• Hélio Oiticica
  Witte de With presented the first retrospective of Brazilian artist Hélio Oiticica (1937 – 1980), whose work had previously been unfamiliar in Europe and North America. The exhibition and accompanying monograph contributed to a more complete understanding of the history of contemporary art, by showing how an artist who was so very representative of his times has influenced the work of a younger generation of artists. Inspired by Mondrian’s color theories and the neo-concrete movement in Brazil, Oiticica’s early works explored the basic structural questions of color and painting. He sought to overcome the surface’s passivity and inertia by hanging works freely in space, and by arranging his suspended color-planes so the viewer could walk among them. In a series of innovative experiments, Oiticica transformed the artwork’s support into a live element. He developed the Box Bolides, introducing spatial divisions and plays on opening and closing; the Penetrables, cabins or labyrinths to be physically entered and explored; and the Parangolés, structures resembling clothing, capes, banners, tents for wearing and dancing. With these works, the word ‘support’ lost its meaning; in the Parangolés, the body was not the support for the work, it was its total incorporation. These works aimed to create an environmental world, in which the participation of the spectator was essential. Oiticica’s work is closely linked to the social and cultural realities of Brazil. His environmental works have a deliberately anti-Beaux Arts, anti-bourgeois aesthetic, which delights in the unpredictable poetry of the streets, such as the architecture of the slums or the samba, both forms of live culture in which everyone participates. Oiticica’s experiments were aimed at finding a true Brazilian art that would transgress stereotypical conceptions of Latin American culture, by aiming not at a new conditioning of the participator, but at overturning every conditioning in quest for individual liberty. The exhibition, which presented a complete survey of Oiticica’s work, included original works and installations as well as reconstructions and the first presentation of the installation Cosmococa (1973), which had never been exhibited during Oiticica’s lifetime. The exhibition traveled to the Galerie nationale de Jeu de Paume in Paris, the Fundació Antoni Tàpies in Barcelona, the Centro de Arte Moderna da Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian in Lisbon, and the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. This international attention for Oiticica’s work has helped the Projeto Hélio Oiticica, the organization that preserves the artist’s oeuvre, receive support from the Ministry of Culture in Rio de Janeiro for the foundation of the Centro de Arte Hélio Oiticica, which opened in September 1996. The extensive website Programa Hélio Oiticica is the result of a collaboration between Itaú Cultural and the Projeto Hélio Oticica. This website, with over 5000 images and documents, opens up the complete oeuvre of Hélio Oiticia for the public at large. In Portuguese. Participants Luciano Figueiredo, Hélio Oiticica, Lygia Pape Curators Guy Brett, Chris Dercon, Catherine David, Lygia Pape <div class="
• Work in Transit
  Record created from the archive project register (access_project / 2026 projects). No corresponding page exists on the institution’s website.
• The Lectures 1992
  The Lectures 1992 This publication is a compilation of the lectures and debates that were held in conjunction with Witte de With’s exhibition program during 1992. Witte de With – The Lectures -1992 is a documentation of the critical discussion that Witte de With had been conducting on 1992’s state of affairs of contemporary art. These lectures and debates not only addressed the so-called theoretical points of interest which Witte de With considered essential to its exhibition programming, but they also served as a communicative forum for the artists, critics, theoreticians and public involved in Witte de With’s exhibitions. The exhibition program of Witte de With in 1992 included, the exhibition of the Brazilian artist Hélio Oiticica (22 February – 26 April 1992); the C.E.E.-Project (1989-1992) by the Spanish artist Antoni Muntadas: united Europe; The exhibition of the Dutch artist Philip Akkerman (May 16 -July 12 1992); the exhibition Walker Evans & Dan Graham (29 August – 11 October 1992), co-curated with Jean-François Chevrier; the collaboration with American artist Haim Steinbach, who curated the exhibition No Rocks Allowed., and the exhibition of the German artist Stephan Balkenhol (12 December 1992 – 24 January 1993), that addressed the concept of mimesis. In the lectures and debates that were programmed with the aforementioned exhibitions, the following themes came up: the importance of the work of Hélio Oiticica for the contemporary art scene, the past and the future of the catalogue as a documentation of art, the significance of Walker Evans for a contemporary comprehension of photography, the status of the exhibition program and of the program as institute, and the sense or the nonsense of the depiction of the human figure in contemporary art. The contributors were: Stephan Balkenhol, Guy Brett, Jean-François Chevrier, Catherine David, Chris Dercon, Ludger Gerdes, Craigie Horsfield, Martin Kreissig, Rodrigo Naves, Walter Nikkels, Stephen Prina, Sônia Salzstein-Goldberg and Jeff Wall. In this issue of The Lectures, Bruce Mau’s talk held in the beginning of 1993 is also included. For indeed, his contribution and that of Walter Nikkels provide interesting points of comparison for the future of art publications like this.
• Muntadas — C.E.E. Project
  Simultaneously with the opening of the exhibition Hélio Oiticica, Witte de With presented the C.E.E. project (1989-1992) by the Spanish artist Antoni Muntadas (1942): the united Europe symbolised in the form of a mundane object, a giant carpet with the image of the European flag. With his C.E.E. project, Muntadas sought to focus attention on the relationship between cultural symbols and the economy as well as to question the objectives and economic prowess of the European Community. The cultural future of a United Europe was presented in the form of a 6 by 4 meter carpet that represented the European flag with a depiction of the member country’s currency in each of the twelve stars. Copies of the carpet were exhibited in other European cities, such as Brussels, Dublin, London, Madrid, Montpellier and Porto. The project was an initiative of the Kanaal Art Foundation in Kortrijk. Participants Antoni Muntadas Curators Chris Dercon <div class="
• 03 General
  Record created from the archive project register (access_project / 2026 projects). No corresponding page exists on the institution’s website.
• The Lectures 1990
  The Lectures 1990 In an effort to add to the debate on contemporary art, Witte de With organized lectures and debates. In these lectures and debates, the exhibitions, the work of the artist(s), and the underlying concepts or reactions which they produced, were commented upon. The lectures and debates were published every year, in an effort to permit fresh consideration and evaluation of the whole exhibition program. The publication The Lectures, 1990 was published in 1991, right after Witte de With’s first year of operation, and includes a complete reproduction of the readings organized by Witte de With during that year. The publication is an aid-memoire for all those interested in keeping an eye on the practice of Witte de With, and on developments that Witte de With is keeping an eye on. These developments are celebrated by a continuing discussion that the center both initiates and encourages. Witte de With is not specifically Dutch, and is only a partial reflection of Rotterdam. The image of art that Witte de With disseminates is a universal and autonomous one. It is a dissemination that should prevent the construction of a framework which can tell us, for example, something about the glamour of art from beyond Europe or North America, or about the terror of current events. Witte de With is like a shore that the waves of the sea of art lap against, and on that shore, stimulating events take place; not only exhibitions, but also readings and debates; A place for the placement of question marks. The program of Witte de With displays a healthy desire for a more heterogeneous culture of divergence.
• Philip Akkerman — Self-Portraits
  Since 1981, Philip Akkerman has applied himself to painting and drawing exclusively self-portraits. The exhibition Philip Akkerman: Self-Portraits presented 450 self-portraits, dating from 1981 until 1992, along with an archive of 676 drawings and autobiographical notebooks in which Akkerman commented on the creation of his works. The works were presented chronologically, suggesting a reconstruction of the painter’s day-to-day life. Traditionally, the self-portrait seeks to depict the inner self; it goes beneath that which can be seen, revealing what is essentially, and thus universally, human. Akkerman’s self-portraits, however, are programmatically executed in a continuing series. They have to do with the conditions of depiction itself and with the issue of resemblance, showing how a depiction is structured, how it can be altered, and how the variation in form is related to the likeness. Painted in an endless variety of styles and techniques, his series of portraits encompasses the history of painting and its relationship to reality. Since he paints nothing but self-portraits, Akkerman’s works lack in a way the depth of the traditional self-portrait. His faces are not distilled, concentrated images of life, but faces like those of any person on any given day. Thus, his portraits are like notes in a diary, bound to commonplace occurrences and the routine of everyday life. However, in the repetition that shows that everything is the same, in showing that each day and each face is followed by another, these banal faces ultimately acquire a universal quality. It is not a heroic quest for one essential work, but an endeavor to save up images that become evident as a work only after one has placed them all together and presented them as a whole. As Akkerman once said: “I paint myself, and so I paint the whole of mankind.” Participants Philip Akkerman Curators Chris Dercon, Gosse Oosterhof <div class="
• 04 general
  Record created from the archive project register (access_project / 2026 projects). No corresponding page exists on the institution’s website.
• The Lectures 1991
  The Lectures 1991 In an effort to add to the debate on contemporary art, Witte de With organized lectures and debates. In these lectures and debates, the exhibitions, the work of the artist(s), and the underlying concepts or reactions which they produced, were commented upon. The lectures and debates were published every year, in an effort to permit fresh consideration and evaluation of the whole exhibition program. The publication The Lectures, 1991 includes the essays and readings concerning the program of Witte de With during 1991. For the lectures of 1991, Witte de With invited the French film theorist Raymond Bellour, to lecture on the relationship between cinema and painting, on the occasion of the exhibition Cézanne, in which, amongst other works, the film Cézanne (1989), by the French film makers Jean-Marie Straub and Danielle Huillet was shown. Further, in a debate that took place in the Rotterdam version of the auditorium installation Creation pendant le troisiéme age (1984), by the German artist Hermann Pitz, the curators Marianne Brouwer and Kasper Kӧnig and the artist Ludger Gerdes discussed the future of public sculptures before an enormous maquette for the new Rotterdam. In conjunction with the exhibition of Jessica Stockholder and Saint Clair Cemin, the American art critic and artist John Miller conveyed his view on the history of assemblage in a lecture entitled The Avant-Garde, Sublimation and the Patriarchy, a sequel to his essay Formalism and its Other, published by Witte de With in the catalogue of Jessica Stockholder. During Facts and Rumours, an exhibition curated by the Dutch artist Henk Visch, and Voorwerk 2, the Franco-Italian ethnologist Remo Guidieri presented a philosophical interpretation of the marriage between the creative process of art and the professionalization of the art world entitled Art and Politics, A Political Economy of Happiness II. With the sixth exhibition of 1991, works by two different artists, the American painter Michael Byron and the Portuguese painter Julião Sarmento, were confronted. Under the title Geographics of Identity the Portuguese sociologist and art critic Alexandre Melo dealt with the relevance and non-relevance of the work outside the so-called ‘art centers’. In conjunction with the exhibition South Bronx Hall of Fame by the Americans John Ahearn and Rigoberto Torres, which had presented an overview of their portrait-sculptures of neighbours and friends in the South Bronx, New York, the Belgian philosopher Bart Verschaffel presented the lecture On Deathmasks: What truths and lies appear in the countenance of the dead in portrait, print or casting?
• Walker Evans and Dan Graham
  The exhibition Walker Evans and Dan Graham took place at Witte de With and the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam. The two artists were considered simultaneously, yet separately, in order to bring attention to their similarities without hiding their differences. American artists Walker Evans (1903-1975) and Dan Graham (1942) are separated by several generations as well as by the institutional divisions of art culture. Evans, considered one of the modern masters of photography, created the core of his oeuvre in the thirties. Graham belongs to the generation of conceptual artists which appeared at the end of the sixties. Both utilized photography to document and analyze architecture, urban life, and vernacular culture. Walker Evans photographed American urban culture. In series such as American Photographs (1938), he systematically documented the archetypes and stereotypes of urban architecture, taking a special interest in the signs of the city and of commerce, and their violent hold on the environment. His work, documentary in style, resists commercial compromise as well as utopian and nationalist Modernism, aiming instead at sober, straightforward registrations. Evans’s photography is related to the critical work Graham started in the sixties. Graham wished to return Pop Art to its place of origin, the media, and to synchronize artistic activity with its critical reception, and thus to identify the art object with its social production, where formalist doctrine tended to isolate it in a strict autonomy, carefully distanced from the sphere of media. The result was Homes for America, a photo essay published in Arts Magazine in 1966. In this work, the commentary is not a secondary reflection on a separate artwork; the work and the commentary are copresent in a single space of perception, which is that of information. Graham’s photojournalism is indebted to Evans’s vision of America, with which he, like most artists of his generation, was very familiar. In Evans’s American Photographs, he recognized the paradigms of suburban urbanism: standardized houses, the architecture of commerce and communication in its mechanized form, common to the industrial world, and in its vernacular aspect specific to America. The very nature of the descriptive value of these images allows the assumption that Graham’s critical distance regarding conceptual art is analogous to the distance which Evans took from the documentary photography which was being practiced in his time. The exhibition at Witte de With presented Dan Graham’s photographic work from 1965-1991, as well as his pavilion Interior Design for Space Showing Videotapes (1986). The exhibition at Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen showed photographs by Walker Evans from 1928-1968. The exhibition traveled to the Musées de Marseilles, the Westfälischer Landesmuseum für Kunst und Kulturgeschichte in Münster, and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. Participants Walker Evans, Dan Graham Curators Chris Dercon Network Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen <div class="
• 06 General
  Record created from the archive project register (access_project / 2026 projects). No corresponding page exists on the institution’s website.
• CLiP — Collective Learning in Practice
  CLiP (Collective Learning in Practice) is an ongoing program at Kunstinstituut Melly. This set holds moving-image material produced within the program.
• Voorwerk 3
  Voorwerk 3 was the third exhibition in the yearly recurrent series ‘Voorwerk’, meaning preliminary work, Witte de With’s annual exhibition of younger artists. As a series, it seeks to provide the first substantial presentation of works by relatively unknown artists. Voorwerk 3, the third in this series, presented works by Dutch artist W.J.M. Kok (1959), Swiss artist Roman Signer (1939), German artist Pia Stadtbäumer (1959), and Belgian artist Koen Theys (1963). W.J.M. Kok investigates the way meaning is constructed. He presented a series of paintings in which he used a simple yet surprising way of working: he reproduced designs from a children’s coloring book in black acrylic paint on white canvas. The results were a series of extremely stylized and analytical paintings, representing the world in simplified images, reminiscent of childhood. Roman Signer works with natural elements: earth, water, wind and fire. In numerous actions, video and film performances, and installations he has engaged himself with representing catastrophical natural forces like fire and explosions. In his installation at Witte de With, Signer addressed these themes by ironically referring to the formalist dogma of Minimalist sculpture. He presented a forest of white sticks, through which an iron drum had forcefully cleared a path. Pia Stadtbäumer investigates the difference between the representation of the human figure and of the human body, concentrating on the depiction of children and adolescents. She brought together bodies made from treated plaster and negative impressions of human figures in domestic architectonic elements such as mantelpieces, creating small configurations that interacted with the architecture of Witte de With. Koen Theys presented a series of provocative sculptures of such banal or offensive subjects as excrement and raised middle fingers. Cast from classical materials, like bronze and steel, but also from unusual materials like polyurethane and latex rubber, the sculptures were alienating as well as ironical. Participants W.J.M Kok, Roman Singer, Pia Stadtbäumer, Koen Theys Curators Chris Dercon, Gosse Oosterhof <div class="
• Shared Space: general
  Record created from the archive project register (access_project / 2026 projects). No corresponding page exists on the institution’s website.
• Director’s Interviews
  Audio recordings of conversations between former directors of the institution and archivist Marjolijn Kok, recorded for the archive. No public web page exists for this series; metadata is taken from the institution’s own sound index.
• No Rocks Allowed (ijskoude douche.)
  The exhibition No Rocks Allowed (ijskoude douche.) at Witte de With was curated by Haim Steinbach (b. 1944). Each year since its inception in 1990, Witte de With has invited an artist to curate an exhibition. The third artist invited to curate an exhibition at Witte de With was Haim Steinbach. Other guest curators have been Jiri Georg Dokoupil (in 1990), Henk Visch (in 1991), Daniel Buren (in 1994), and Jef Cornelis (in 1995). The exhibition No Rocks Allowed (ijskoude douche.) included Haim Steinbach's selected texts, films, videotapes and objects by: Bas Jan Ader, Marcel Broodthaers, James Joyce, Joseph Kosuth, Cas Oorthuys, Klaus Rinke, Gerry Schum, Shelly Silver, J.J. Slauerhoff, the Van Toer family, G. Lee Thompson, and Lawrence Weiner. Haim Steinbach borrowed the title No Rocks Allowed. from an advertisement where the phrase alluded to the outstanding quality of the advertized product. In his work, Steinbach often employs images and wording from consumer society that have been anonymously conceived and created by others. The objects and slogans which Steinbach shows always remain what they originally were; he leaves it up to the viewer to assess whether they will belong to the domain of art or not. In both the exhibition and the accompanying catalogue, which functioned as a complement to the exhibition, the images and texts that were brought together remained primarily autonomous works by others, both artists and non-artists. But something else occurred in Steinbach’s selections and arrangements; he appealed to the full concept of comparison. Images and texts, which at first appeared to have little in common, were placed beside one another, under one and the same nomenclature, and in the name of something that we all allege to know: art. Yet the images and texts actually were connected by one element they all had in common: in one way or another they all referred to or made use of water. Participants Bas Jan Ader, Marcel Broodthaers, James Joyce, Joseph Kosuth, Cas Oorthuys, Klaus Rinke, Gerry Schum, Shelly Silver, J.J. Slauerhoff, de familie Van Toer, Lee G. Thompson, Lawrence Weiner Curators Haim Steinbach <div class="
• JET
  Record created from the archive project register (access_project / 2026 projects). No corresponding page exists on the institution’s website.
• Name Takes (podcast)
  Podcast series hosted by Kay Em exploring the history of names and the institution’s renaming from Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art to Kunstinstituut Melly. Metadata is taken from the institution’s own sound index.
• Huttenlocher, Lasker, Van Merendonk
  With Huttenlocher, Lasker, Van Merendonk, Witte de With presented an exhibition about painting. Huttenlocher, Lasker, Van Merendonk examined fine painting in a critical light and put its conventions and truisms on line. Swiss artist Britta Huttenlocher (1962), American artist Jonathan Lasker (1948) and Dutch artist Jos van Merendonk (1956) are from different generations and ranges of influence. Yet they each seek to develop a way of painting that strikes a balance between the abstract and figurative. Interestingly, in spite of their different aesthetic solutions, the works of all three can be seen as fact-inscribed grids. Huttenlocher’s work bears witness to nineteenth-century picturesque landscape painting, with its typical theme of glorifying nature. The landscape’s beauty was typically expressed through such painterly techniques as brightening with white and suggesting spontaneity through sketchy outlines and rough brushstrokes. Huttenlocher achieves essentially the same painterly effects through collage: by piecing black-and-white photocopies of postcards into depictions of snow-capped mountains. Yet, like a reversal of the Impressionistic image, her works, when seen from a distance, resemble abstract, monotone paintings. Lasker’s arrangements call personal expression into question. Images are put together in a way that assumes spontaneity. In his work color fields and patterns are infiltrated by bold abstract forms, that seem to stand out against the background. He juxtaposes linear motifs with patterns of thick, tangible brushstrokes in shimmering colors. According to Lasker, paintings should above all be specific: unique while confronting the viewer with their immediate presence. According to Van Merendonk, his endless partitions in green are the results of an accumulation of cliché characteristics from abstract painting. By putting these elements through a process of painting, scraping, carving and repainting, he evokes an entire range of colors and spatial effects in his monotone surfaces. Participants Britta Huttenlocher, Jonathan Lasker, Jos van Merendonk Curators Chris Dercon, Roland Groenenboom, Gosse Oosterhof <div class="
• ArtVIPS
  Record created from the archive project register (access_project / 2026 projects). No corresponding page exists on the institution’s website.
• IFFR — International Film Festival Rotterdam collaborations
  Recordings of lectures and discussions presented in collaboration with International Film Festival Rotterdam. Metadata is taken from the institution’s own sound index.
• Michelangelo Pistoletto — e la fotografia
  The exhibition Michelangelo Pistoletto e la fotografia contributed to Witte de With’s investigation into the relationship between photography and the visual arts. The exhibition presented the first survey of Italian artist Michelangelo Pistoletto’s (1933) photographic work. Pistoletto is generally associated with Arte Povera, a movement not usually connected to the implications of photography. Witte de With presented Pistoletto’s photographic works as a concentrated group, stressing the role of photography throughout his oeuvre. These works were motivated by Pistoletto’s interest in the mediation between the internal logic of the image and the external effect of that same image on the viewer. For Pistoletto, this could only be achieved through the means of photography. He replaced the background of his figurative paintings by a sheet of highly polished stainless steel that acted as a mirror and turned the painted figure into a photographic one. By using a mirror as surface, the photographic figure is detached from the pictorial background. Thus, the logic of perspective is both fulfilled and reversed: the viewer penetrates the background of the picture by drawing away, or enters the picture – and sees himself entering it – to the extent that he draws near. What was the background becomes the space between objects in which the viewer can move, just as his reflection moves within the time of the mirror painting. As Pistoletto has said: “I’m interested in the passage between objects more than in the objects themselves.” The mirror paintings enabled Pistoletto to escape all problems of change in pictorial art. They refer to both present and past; the present being affirmed through the mobility of the beholder’s reflection, while the photographic image refers to a past experience. Two related but asynchronous experiences are thus made to figure in the same picture. These dialectics were taken even further in a later series of mirror paintings in which Pistoletto reproduced his own objects, installations and sculptures. The exhibition traveled to the Fundação de Serralves in Porto. Participants Michelangelo Pistoletto Curators Chris Dercon, Camiel van Winkel <div class="
• Prix de Rome.nl 2007
  Record created from the archive project register (access_project / 2026 projects). No corresponding page exists on the institution’s website.
• Uncataloged archive recordings
  Audio recordings held in the archive that are not attributed to a specific exhibition or program in the institution’s sound index.
• AS LONG AS IT LASTS
  For the exhibition AS LONG AS IT LASTS Witte de With invited nine artists to realize installations in relation to the architecture of its exhibition spaces, taking painting as a starting point. In the confrontation between painting and the architectural space, possibilities for a further development in painting were sought after and questioned. The artists shown in AS LONG AS IT LASTS were: Rob Birza (1962), Raoul De Keyser (1930), Ludger Gerdes (1954), Fons Haagmans (1948), Henri Jacobs (1957), Marien Schouten (1956), Philippe Van Snick (1946), Jessica Stockholder (1959), and Lawrence Weiner (1942). With AS LONG AS IT LASTS Witte de With wanted to test painting’s autonomy by making it address the two- and three-dimensional divisions of architectural space. The artists approached this challenge with sometimes far-reaching measures: Stockholder literally broke down parts of walls, while Birza added objects like mattresses and chairs to his wall paintings. As a result, the exhibition could be seen as contending the further development of painting in a contemporary context that simultaneously preaches both its crisis and revival, but where, in most cases, only the “object value” of painting is emphasized. In contrast to these consecrated objects, the paintings in AS LONG AS IT LASTS were not meant to last; after the exhibition ended, the walls were painted over. As part of the exhibition AS LONG AS IT LASTS, Lawrence Weiner realized a special work for the Euromast in Rotterdam. His text AS LONG AS IT LASTS painted on the Euromast was one of the largest works Weiner has ever realized. With this project, Witte de With wanted to further contribute to the discussion on the role of art in public spaces. The film El sol del membrillo (1992), by the Spanish filmmaker Victor Erice (1940), about the making of a painting of a quince tree, was shown in conjunction with the exhibition. Participants Rob Birza, Raoul De Keyser, Ludger Gerdes, Fons Haagmans, Henri Jacobs, Marien Schouten, Philippe van Snick, Jessica Stockholder, Lawrence Weiner Curators Chris Dercon, Gosse Oosterhof <div class="