The Rijksmuseum is staging its new exhibition Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen at Rijksmuseum in autumn 2023. With Rotterdam’s Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen closed for renovations, this exhibition offers a unique opportunity to see the museum’s exceptional collection in Amsterdam. This show of more than 90 works of art includes The Tower of Babel by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Little Dancer Aged Fourteen by Edgar Degas and Yayoi Kusama’s Infinity Mirror Room – Phalli’s Field (Floor Show). Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen at Rijksmuseum will run from 29 September 2023 to 14 January 2024.

This exhibition takes a journey into human existence, through art from the Middle Ages to today. While so many aspects of human life are universal – birth, youth, growing up, sexuality, ageing and death – we have experienced them differently across the centuries.

Friso Lammertse, curator of 17th century Dutch painting Rijksmuseum
Internationally acclaimed collection

The collection of Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, largely assembled by Rotterdam collectors, industrialists, and shipping magnates who had a great fondness for art, is internationally renowned. The museum houses famous old masters and a prominent collection of contemporary art.

Exhibition
Besides the pieces already mentioned here, the exhibition includes Two Girls near an Apple Tree by Edvard Munch, Vincent van Gogh’s Portrait of Armand Roulin, Composition with Colour Fieds by Piet Mondriaan and The Shooting Gallery by Pyke Koch, as well as work by Cindy Sherman, Salvador Dalí and Pablo Picasso. And of course we have included The Pedlar by Hieronymus Bosch. There will also be a generous selection of outstanding drawings from the Print Room, by the likes of Käthe Kollwitz, Hendrik Goltzius, Peter Paul Rubens and Matthias Grünewald. Ugo Rondinone’s light installation Breathe, Walk, Die will be displayed in our Vermeer extension, where it will be visible from outdoors on Museum Square. In the atrium of the Philips Wing, a work by Donald Judd (Untitled, 1984) will be on display, constructed with large aluminum colour panels. The exhibition will be arranged thematically, allowing artworks from all periods to be seen in relation to each other.

Newly restored
Yayoi Kusama’s Infinity Mirror Room – Phalli’s Field (Floor Show) (1965/1998) is on show for the first time since its extensive restoration, at the Rijksmuseum. A team of restorers from Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen has worked for months cleaning the white fabric phalluses covered with red dots, so the work by Yayoi Kusama now on display looks like new. She is among the world’s most acclaimed contemporary artists.

Reason for the exhibition
The main reason for this collaboration is that the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam is currently being renovated in a project that will take many years. The collection is still on view, however, thanks to the opening of Depot Boijmans van Beuningen in 2021, the world’s first art storage facility open to the public. The Rijksmuseum exhibition features many important works from the Rotterdam collection that are on display for the first time in the Netherlands since 2019.

Audio tours: words and music
The exhibition is accompanied by an audio tour in which Rotterdam-based presenter and musician Raven van Dorst and the curators wander from artwork to artwork discussing the themes of the exhibition. There will also be a music tour composed and produced by DJ Upsammy.

The Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen at Rijksmuseum exhibition has been made possible by generous loans from Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam.