Recently, it added Arnhem hospital Rijnstate added two works of art to their art collection. Both works were commissioned: Maria Barnas created a work of art for the atrium and Jannemarein Renout for the main entrance. Rijnstate's art coordinator is visual artist Jeroen Glas. Esther Didden talked to him about the art collection and viewed the new works of art.
Glass graduated from Academy Minerva in 2003 and from the Frank Mohr Institute in Groningen in 2005. He specialized in light and video art. He is still active as an artist and has also been Rijnstate's art coordinator for nine years. Since the start of the new building in 1992, there has been an art committee responsible for the art collection, which includes nearly 700 works of art: in addition to paintings, photographs and prints, seating, tables and sculptures.
Since the start of the new building, there has been an art committee
Thus, there are Letter Furniture by Marc Ruygrok on the floors. They are actually sculptures of block letters on which you can sit. At Rijnstate, they have one copper, one brass and a dozen birchwood letter furniture by him. For the eight day rooms on the nursing wards, Jolanda Muilenburg and Wilfried Nijhof of the Zwändel firm designed a wall decoration: a modular system of MDF panels, as if they were strips of wallpaper, with an enlarged plant design on them.
Wherever you are as a patient or visitor at Rijnstate, you will encounter art everywhere. "Because art belongs in a hospital," says Glas, "in a hospital we feel all kinds of things, we think about what happens to us. If the hospital pays attention to the whole person, chances are you'll feel better. Art is able to feed the soul. Especially in a hospital where as a patient, but also as a visitor, we are confronted with life itself, it is meaningful to be able and allowed to reflect. With art, that is possible."
Rijnstate's collection focuses primarily on artists from the region, then artists from the rest of the Netherlands and very occasionally from beyond. Glass deals with the collection, arranging exhibitions for the first floor gallery and is an advisor to the internal art committee especially when it comes to commissions. If there is construction work, there is sometimes a budget for art, but otherwise there is no official art budget. Each meeting considers what is needed and what can be done. So far this has worked. When a new main entrance was built, Glas wanted Jannemarein Renout to create a work of art for it. Her abstract color prints are created by pointing and document scanner at the sky or water surfaces. Glas thought the work was very suitable for placing as a large print above the main entrance, where a closed off part of the hospital, the children's clinic playground, is no longer visible. If you now walk as a visitor through the doors of the main entrance, you see above you on the second floor, a cloudy sky. It is ten by three meters and beautiful in color. Using her computer scanner, Renout "captured" a cloud sky. She put the device in the open air and let it scan the sky. The film on which the scan is printed is slightly transparent so the colors are brighter in sunny weather. From the main entrance you can't see through the foil, but if you're in the children's ward you can. Then you can see silhouettes of people entering or leaving the hospital.
The assignment to Renout went smoothly because there was a budget for art from the construction work. She was awarded the commission last September and it was completed last January. It was different with the commission to Maria Barnas. From idea to realization took about four years. That had to do with fundraising but also with the technically complex nature of the work. The walkway in the atrium has become the support for dozens of Barnas's poems. As a result, the walkway is not only functionally connecting, but also symbolic.
From idea to realization took about four years
Since the outbreak of the corona pandemic, Barnas conducted interviews with employees at Rijnstate. What impact did corona have on their work, what changed, what did it mean to them to care for another? Poems emerged from those conversations and her own experiences. Under the walkway is now a 46-foot-long news ticker on which poetic phrases pass by. The sentences meet in the image, changing form and content. Words appear and fall apart like pixels. Barnas wanted her poems to mutate, to change and not always have the same structure and reading style as in a classic book of poetry. The poems in Rijnstate allow themselves to be read piecemeal, depending on when you walk into the atrium. Barnas' poems consist of fleeting thoughts, observations, reflections, memories and medical facts.
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