At home in green

Photo↑: work by Annelies Dijkman. © Joep Jacobs

In April, in Museum The Lakenhal the exhibition Floris Verster - At Home in Green. For the first time, the museum is combining work by Verster with contemporary art. Artists Seet van Hout, Esther Hoogendijk and Annelies Dijkman created new work inspired by Verster. The museum also hosts an extensive public program and is stepping outside its own walls with this exhibition. A reason for Esther Didden to present the press opening attend and with artist Annelies Dijkman in conversation, who created a work for public space. 

Floris Verster is considered an innovator in the field of floral still lifes. His contemporaries painted exotic flowers and plants; Verster, on the other hand, chose flowers from his own garden. This made his paintings revolutionary. Poppies and field flowers quickly turn brown and wilt. Verster also captured that process. He saw beauty in simplicity and transience. He found inspiration mainly in his own garden on Groenoord estate in Leiden. His wife picked the flowers and arranged the field bouquets, after which Verster drew and painted them. In the exhibition, his pastels, paintings and drawings are presented in relation to the Flora Batava (1800-1934), the first illustrated survey of flowers and plants from Dutch soil, as well as in relation to three contemporary artists. 

Seet van Hout created new monumental drawings and paintings by pouring paint and perforating paper. She plays with the important themes in Verster's work: beauty and decay, whimsy and flowering. Esther Hoogendijk made sculptures from living materials such as seeds, sprouts and grasses. Her artworks are brought to life by sun, water and touch. Her sculptures follow the natural process of growth, flowering and decay. 

In the 17th century, when the Laecken-Halle gardens were also geometric in design

On the square in front of the museum entrance, Annelies Dijkman created the temporary installation Blomhof. Her design establishes a relationship with the surroundings: the planters run with the floor. In the 17th century, when the Laecken-Halle - today's museum De Lakenhal - was built, the gardens were also geometric in design. The title Blomhof refers to the 16th century, when a thriving culture in collecting and growing plants developed in the Netherlands. The Hortus Botanicus Leiden, for example, was established in 1590 because the university wanted a garden of medicinal plants for the study of medicine. 

When Dijkman researched Leiden's garden history for this assignment, she soon came across Marie de Brimeu (1550-1605), a noblewoman from the Southern Netherlands who lived in Leiden for a time around 1590. De Brimeu had a great love for growing plants and gardening and corresponded extensively on the subject, including with Carolus Clusius, a famous botanist at the time. A quote Dijkman came across in the correspondence is "Thank God the war does not seem to deprive us of or make impossible the pleasure of gardening." The quote is from a letter in which De Brimeu is trying to persuade Clusius to head the Hortus. The war De Brimeu is referring to is Eighty Years' War (1568-1648) which forced her to move to the Northern Netherlands.

Dijkman incorporated the quote into her installation. For her, it establishes a connection to the current times in which gardening is experienced by many people as relaxing and contributes to mental and physical well-being. Even in refugee camps people garden, a sign of survival and hope. Dijkman's choice of plants for Blomhof is based on the cycle of plants: growth, flowering and decay. This is also the reference to Verster. Dijkman did not want evergreen plants that hardly change. She selected the plants primarily by smell. During the project, she will maintain the plants, replacing them as needed.

Each site has its own history, spatiality and function

Annelies Dijkman is both an artist and a gardener. In her work, she makes no distinction between art projects and garden designs. In this museum commission, both disciplines come together nicely. She finds the garden fascinating as a cultural space and as a defined place and is interested in the meaning of gardens and gardening. "Each site has its own history, spatiality and function. I incorporate these contextual characteristics into my art projects. This creates a relationship with the environment; they are not autonomous works."

The exhibition itself features a work by Dijkman that she created for the museum in 1998. Euphony is a symphony of bird sounds. She created this work at the time for the museum's stairwell. In the coming months it will be heard at the exhibition Floris Verster - At home in greenery. Outside on the forecourt, Dijkman responds to Verster's work with a changing and fragrant geometric flower installation; with the 1998 symphony, she brings the sounds of the outdoors inside. 

In the Singel Park you can walk the Floris Verster route until the end of August, there are flowers and plants painted by Verster that were in his garden in Groenoord.