Exhibition inviting viewers to 17th-century Holland

ISTANBUL - Hürriyet Daily News

The exhibition will present a total number of 110 works.

Rembrandt and His Contemporaries exhibition being hosted by the Sabancı Museum is curated to take the audience to a journey to the 17th century’s Holland which becomes the setting of Dutch Golden Age. 

The Sabancı Museum hosted a press meeting yesterday with participation of representatives of sponsor companies. The exhibition, “Where Darkness Meets Light… Rembrandt and His Contemporaries” marks the 400th year of diplomatic relations between Turkey and the Netherlands and features works from the Rijksmuseum as well as leading private collections of the world, which are being displayed for the first time in Turkey.

Speaking to the Hürriyet Daily News, the exhibition’s curator Pieter Roelofs said that his curation was to tell the story of the 17th century Holland which became one of the most developed countries in European art thanks to the wealth it accumulated through overseas trade in the 17th century.

The exhibition will present a total number of 110 works: 73 paintings, 19 drawings and 18 objects by 59 artists including major representatives of Dutch art. In addition to works of Rembrandt, the exhibition also presents Vermeer’s painting “The Love Letter”, as well as works by other great Dutch painters including Frans Hals, Jan Steen and Jacob van Ruisdael.

Although it is in the museum’s collection, the exhibition selection does not include Rembrandt’s famous “The Night Watch,” due to is size and fragility, Roelofs said, adding the museum never lent the painting out. 

Speaking at the opening Sabancı Museum Director Nazan Ölçer said the art museums differed from art galleries with respect their mission to instruct the viewers, as well as inviting them to question what they think they already know about what is no display before their eyes. Therefore the museum has organizes a series of side events to go along the exhibition which is to run between Feb 22 and July 10.

The side events include film screenings, seminars and conferences. Every Wednesday between March 7 and April 11, professor Uşun Tükel will be lecturing on arts in Europe with a focus on the time span between “anti-Reformation” and the Enlightenment.

The conference topics include “Traveling Plants and Tulipomania,” “Modernity and Baroque Architecture in Its European and Ottoman Contexts,” “The Relations Between the Netherlands and the Ottoman Empire in the 17th Century,” “Music in Europe in the 17th Century,” “Scientific Research on Art: Tracing Rembrandt and His Circle,” “The Netherlands Group Portrait and Rembrandt’s ‘Syndics’,” “The omnipresence of paintings in Dutch homes and public buildings in the age of Rembrandt and Vermeer,” “Rembrandt and Orientalism,” “Rembrandt: His World of Light and Shadow.

The film screenings are Peter Webber’s 2003 movie “Girl with a Pearl Earring,” which is based on Tracy Chevalier’s 1999 novel with the same title. The screenings are to repeat on March 11, April 8, May, 13, June 10, basically on second Sunday of each month, while “Dutch Light and Rembrandt Films” is screened every day, at the exhibition gallery’s second floor.