From the museum website
Social commitment
There has recently been much discussion about the tenability of traditional, art-historical collections displays centred purely upon artistic and stylistic developments. Such displays seldom refer to current or social developments. With the exhibition Standpoints the Centraal Museum is taking up an alternative position. The title refers to the openness with which artists look at the world around them. Many of them have a visual antenna or a particularly instinctive feeling for social, political and economic themes. Standpoints attempts to identify these ‘lost’ themes in the Centraal Museum’s collection of modern art. The display is based around the following themes: freedom, politics, the elite, realism, mass culture, the subconscious and melancholy.
Wall paintings
Seven contemporary artists have been commissioned to make a wall drawing or wall painting as a direct reaction to the exhibition’s themes. Each artist has been allotted a particular gallery with one particular theme and has reacted in a free and personal way to the selected art works on display. The invited artists are Gerard Polhuis (freedom), Henri Jacobs (the elite), Willehad Eilers (politics), Aam Solleveld (realism), Marijn van Kreij (mass culture), Roland Sohier (subconscious) and Manon Bovenkerk (melancholy).
Three displays of the collection
Standpoints, curated by Meta Knol, is one of three presentations of the Centraal Museum’s permanent collection during 2008. The exhibition Script, curated by Pauline Terreehorst, places masterpieces from the collections of fashion and interiors in a filmic setting. We discover that the history of film runs largely parallel to the history of fashion and serial-produced design. The exhibition Sublime will display highlights from the collection of old masters. The display employs eight themes to sketch a picture of the city of Utrecht and its citizens, their religious and worldly inclinations and of course the talent of Utrecht’s artists from the fifteenth to the nineteenth century.