The imposing Willet-Holthuysen House is situated in the centre of Amsterdam. This double mansion on the Herengracht contains many period rooms. Its beautiful salons are in the style of Louis XVI, and the garden is symmetrically designed as a French formal garden. The Amsterdam Museum will hold exhibitions with work by contemporary makers and collectors in these Romantic period rooms.
The Amsterdam Museum opens a solo exhibition by painter Maaike Schoorel (1973) on May 7 at the Willet-Holthuysen House, its unique location at Herengracht 605. The exhibition will run from May 7 to October 30, 2022. For this occasion, Schoorel has produced a series of ten new paintings and a site-specific installation that invites visitors to experience her associative research through photographs, collages, and special discoveries from the collection. She focuses in particular on Louisa Willet-Holthuysen, the collector who gifted the building, with its completely new French interiors and decorations in the Louis XVI style, to the municipality in 1895, with the behest to turn it into a museum. Schoorel assumes the personage of this woman and plays with her passion for animals and nature. She also draws associations between her and another female museum founder of that time, Sophia Lopez Suasso-de Bruijn, who laid the foundation for the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam. In doing so, Schoorel offers a reinterpretation and reevaluation of women’s roles, then and now.
