The Kremer Collection announced the launch of the Kremer Museum, an innovative new concept that allows visitors to experience over 70 seventeenth-century Dutch and Flemish Old Master paintings from the private collection through Virtual Reality (VR) technology.  The museum’s virtual architecture was designed by architect Johan van Lierop,

The Kremer Collection, founded by CODART Patron George Kremer in 1994, includes paintings  by renowned masters such as Gerrit Dou, Pieter de Hooch, Frans Hals,  Jan Lievens, Rembrandt, Michael Sweerts and Gerrit van Honthorst and works by lesser known artists such as Adriaen Hanneman, Abraham Bloemaert, Abraham Janssens, Theodoor Rombouts, Jan Baptist Weenix, Emanuel de Witte, Ludolf Backhuizen and many more. Over the past twenty years, many of the works from the collection have been on display in a variety of exhibitions and on long-term loans with international museums.

For the creation of the museum, each painting has been photographed between 2,500 and 3,500 times using the ‘photogrammetry’ technique to build one ultra high resolution visual model for each painting, allowing the museum’s visitors to enjoy a deeply immersive experience with the paintings. Using VR technology, visitors will be able to examine the artworks’ surface and colors up-close, as well as view the reverse of the paintings to explore each work’s unique stamps of provenance.

Discussing the establishment of the Kremer Museum, George Kremer says, “Our journey as collectors has always been about finding the highest quality artworks and simultaneously finding ways to share them with as many people as possible. My wife Ilone and I believe we can make a greater contribution to the art world by investing in technology rather than in bricks and mortar for our collection.”

In the coming months, a number of exclusive pop-up events with a full VR set-up. Dates will be announced on the Kremer Collection’s website in due course.

Video announcing the launch of the Kremer Museum:

Mighty Masters

The launch of the virtual reality system is accompanied by the announcement of TKC Mighty Masters, an education program that will see virtual reality sets and a teaching pack sent to schools in remote regions around the world. To select its first schools, TKC Mighty Masters will partner with India’s Delivering Change Foundation to host a drawing contest among over one million children in India.