The National Art Museum of Romania invites you to the opening of the photo exhibition Depictions, by the Dutch artist Danielle van Zadelhoff on Sunday, May 26, 2024, at 6 pm, in the presence of the artist. The exhibition will be open to the public from 29 May to 29 September 2024 in the Print Room and exhibition spaces of the European Art Gallery.
With this exhibition project, the National Art Museum of Romania proposes to the public a unique dialogue between contemporary art and the works of the old masters. Some of the photographs will be presented in dialogue with the works of European masters in the European Art Gallery to highlight, through thematic groupings or compositional associations, its ability to create unique artistic images based on great European visual landmarks. The relationship between photography and painting is a first for museums in Romania, which the National Art Museum of Romania will present in a spectacular scenographic development, specially designed for this exhibition.
Born in Amsterdam in 1963, Danielle van Zadelhoff turned to photography relatively late, at a turning point in her life in 2013, when her emotional baggage, time-honoured upbringing and visual memory refined by her familiarity with classical artworks merged to produce memorable artistic images with carefully directed scenography, charged with expressiveness, sensitivity and emotion. The characters in her photographs, contemporary, real, discrepant in their presence in those ancient settings, seduce us with the intensity of their gaze and invite us into their innocent, vulnerable, pure inner world.
In the practice of many contemporary artists the dialogue with the past, personal or cultural, takes on various creative forms designed to offer a new positioning and perspective on old themes. Danielle van Zadelhoff is one such artist who, with the help of photographic portraiture and chiaroscuro, recreates atmospheres specific to 17th and sometimes 18th century paintings, with the aim of analysing human emotions and feelings.
The 27 photographs on display in this exhibition, portraits and seductive, mysterious and profound compositions, are familiar to us, evoking the chiaroscuro of Caravaggism, the carefully directed light of the Rembrandtian style, or the innocent glances of young girls taken from the pictorial atmosphere of J.B. Greuze or J.H. Fragonard. Alongside their staging, posture and expression, another link between these works and European visual art is the exploration of Christian or ancient themes with a moralising flavour, such as female vulnerability in the images of Suzanne or Lucretia, motherhood in the Madonna and Child, sin in the well-known revisitation of Paradise Lost (Adam and Eve) or the irreversible passage of time in the evocation of Magdalene's penance or the theme of Vanitas.
Entrance to the exhibition is through MNAR's European Art Gallery (Calea Victoriei 49-53).
The event is realized and promoted with the support of ING Bank Romania, main sponsor, ArteVezi, Intercontinental Athénée Palace, Aqua Carpatica and Domeniile Sâmburești.
