Musea Brugge announces the appointment of Anna Koopstra as curator of Early Netherlandish painting, starting 1 September.

Anna Koopstra previously worked at the Suermondt-Ludwig Museum in Aachen, The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and The National Gallery in London. She also worked as a guest curator of the exhibition on Lucas Gassel at Museum Helmond and as a researcher at the World Museum in Rotterdam, among other places. Koopstra studied art history at the University of Groningen, where she specialized in fifteenth-century painting in the Southern Netherlands and wrote a thesis on material research on the oeuvre of Jan van Eyck. She received her doctorate from The Courtauld Institute of Art in London in 2016 with a dissertation on the early sixteenth-century artist Jean Bellegambe. She was an associate member of CODART from 2018 until 2021.

Koopstra specializes in researching the materials and techniques of paintings, the working methods of artists, and the original meaning and context of artworks. She collaborated on the exhibition Man, Myth, and Sensual Pleasures: Jan Gossart’s Renaissance (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2010), curated among other exhibitions Giovanni da Rimini: A 14th-Century Masterpiece Unveiled (National Gallery, 2016) and Lucas Gassel of Helmond. Master of the Landscape (Museum Helmond, 2020) and has published on artists of the fourteenth, fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In 2022, her book Jean Bellegambe. Making, meaning and patronage of his works was published, and most recently she was commissioned by Musea Brugge to work on a publication on Hans Memling that will be published in December on the occasion of the opening of the renovated Museum Sint-Janshospitaal.

Source: press release Musea Brugge, 28 August 2023