Museum Beelden Aan Zee

Last weekend I was quite impressed about the Museum Beelden aan Zee, in Den Hague. Both the museum itself and the expositions it showed.

Architectonically, the museum could be unterstood as the typical extension of a former museum sit in an old house in which the extension remains underground in order not to contend with the main building (a lot of this subject can be studied in the Serlachius Museum competition). In this case, the underground extension stands around the main building, allowing it to reassure its presence in the massive main building line parallel to the coast not by adding a volume but a void. In fact it is the only place where there is no building at all in the long building line what attracts your eye.

The only characteristic that seems not to be solved is the fact that the main building, not being part of the museum itself, remains the most important element in the composition, as the center or the main axis around which the extension spreads. This makes the entrance, which in a natural way should be placed in the main axis, to be moved to a corner to allow the beginning of the exposition route begin not from the main building.

Regarding the expositions, the first one was about the chinese artist Sui Jianguo. Worldwide known for his sculptures of Mao suits, in the exposition were there a version of this theme, two of the slaves Michelangelo created wearing  Mao suits. There were also some examples of his stage in which he focussed on the stones, again as a metaphor of the chinese society. But the most impressive and powerful ones were an installation placed outside in a courtyard of the museum and a work made specially in collaboration with Den Haag, “Den Haag onder de hemel”, a collection of different typically dutch characters hanging from the ceiling not vertically but forming an angle of six degrees, the same angle between the two lines that link each country, China and the Netherlands, with the center of the Earth, symbolizing how the Nederlands would be seen from China.

The second exposition was ‘Denkeiland’ from the dutch sculptress and photographer Eveline van Duyl. It consists in around fifteen caricature-like busts of the most important western filosophers. Each sculpture is made with different surprising materials, as if she would like to express her personal different opinion of each one. It is incredible how she manages to sculpt with materials such as leather, textiles or wood.