Image: Kunsthal, Rotterdam
Kunsthal Rotterdam marked Woody van Amen’s ninetieth birthday on 26 August 2026, midway through ‘Woody van Amen. The Best of’, the retrospective it opened on 25 April 2026 in Hal 4. The show runs to 4 October 2026 and pays tribute to one of the most influential Dutch artists of the post-war avant-garde.
The exhibition presents key pieces from an oeuvre spanning decades and follows the work from the early 1960s onwards, as van Amen became one of the pioneers of pop art in the Netherlands. It moves from pop art paintings and assemblages to the taxat designs, tracing how he has tested the boundaries of visual culture, technology and spirituality.
One of the singular works on show is ‘Habanera’ (1961), presented at the time as the world’s longest painting: van Amen painted it onto a thirteen-metre barrel-organ book, adding his own abstract, expressionist score across the holes that determine the music. In the 1960s he travelled to the United States, where he met artists including Andy Warhol and Robert Rauschenberg, and the encounter with a scene preoccupied by everyday objects, brand names and consumer imagery is visible in early paintings that use names such as RVS, Philips and Wrigley in urban street scenes of neon signs, logos and industrial forms.
The assemblages combine elements of everyday objects that move, make sounds or freeze things, among them his ice machines, and are shown alongside the Vibro objects, sculptures that vibrate by means of small motors or mechanical parts salvaged from discarded equipment. The electric chair recurs as a theme drawn from the harsher side of American culture, isolated by van Amen into an autonomous sculptural object.
A further strand is his use of symbols encountered in travel, many with originally religious connotations: drawings of Indonesian shadow puppets and other motifs carry Asian influences. The Taxat, a double-cross design he noticed in the upholstery of a Singapore taxi and named after where he found it, became one of the most familiar symbols in his work, and he had a mathematical rendering made of the three-dimensional form, built from thirteen cubes. The summit of the Matterhorn and Nepalese prayer flags recur as well.
Kunsthal Rotterdam describes the exhibition as a collaboration between the institution, the artist and guest curator Irma Boom, who joined at the initiative of EENWERK founder Julius Vermeulen. Several of the works shown are courtesy of EENWERK, among them ‘Pura Melanting’ (1978), ‘Landschape with Two Horizons’ (2003) and a ‘Vibro-object’ of 1971. The exhibition partner is the Erasmus Stichting, with support from the Mondriaan Fund and Stichting Droom en Daad.
The birthday item led a wider Kunsthal mailing whose other entries covered the closing weekend of ‘Flowers Forever’, a public vote for the Museumtijdschrift exhibition prize, a KunstKoppels event tied to ‘Helen Levitt. City at Play’ and a September Friday Night LIVE with Wildlife Film Festival Rotterdam. Those are separate from the van Amen retrospective. The newsletter also carried a video about the exhibition, credited to Hunted Agency.
