SOME HUNTERS RESTING BY A RUIN AND A FOUNTAIN, 1864–2014
Francesco Stocchi and Martijn Hendriks
15 February 2014

 

Talk and presentation as part of the exhibition "Impossible Show"

During a disastrous fire in the year 1864, a great number of works of the collection of the Museum Boijmans van Beuningen’s in Rotterdam were destroyed. Thus, only fifteen years after its establishment, ninety percent of the entire museum collection had turned into rubble and ash. The museum collection was catalogued using literary descriptions of the work, which gave information according to the receptive image categories. Hardly any photographic representation of the paintings survived the fire, leaving only the literary descriptions of the work behind. The project "Some hunters resting by a ruin and a fountain, 1864–2014" attempts, with assistance of the visual vocabulary of 2014, to reconstruct a selection of these works. It is less about a revival of the images, as it is about a reformulation 150 years, of the lost representations of the work in combination with freely associated images from the internet.

Francesco Stocchi is Curator for Modern and Contemporary Art at The Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam. Martijn Hendriks (born 1973 in Eindhoven, The Netherlands) is artist and lives and works in Amsterdam.

Images
Francesco Stocchi and Martijn Hendriks: Some hunters resting by a ruin and a fountain, 1864-2014, 2014
Photo: Hartwig Schwarz