Evi Vingerling and Katja Mater: Light on Things

In collaboration with Hartwig Art Foundation.

For the first time, Centraal Museum presents a duo exhibition at Landhuis Oud Amelisweerd, the 18th-century country estate just outside Utrecht. In Light on Things, new site-specific works by Katja Mater and Evi Vingerling unfold across the historical rooms, exploring light, time, memory, and grief. Though working in distinct media—Mater through lens-based installations and Vingerling through abstract painting—both artists engage in a resonant dialogue on the movement of time and the presence of absence.

Curated by Bart Rutten, Artistic Director of Centraal Museum, Light on Things transforms the historic house into a contemplative space where personal experience meets collective reflection. “Mater and Vingerling bring a poetic clarity to the house,” Rutten notes. “Themes of belonging and mourning create an intimate tension between the historic architecture and contemporary sensibility. Rarely has the changing light of Oud Amelisweerd felt so present.”

Bringing the landscape inside
In five rooms on the first floor of the mansion, Katja Mater deploys the principle of the camera obscura as scenography to display works in. Through lenses in the window blinds, the artist lets in the surrounding Dutch landscape, like an inverted echo of the exotic paper wallpaper in the Chinese salon on the estate's ground floor. The green surroundings of the house, which attract thousands of walkers every spring, thus become an integral part of the exhibition.

Inside these live projections, Mater exhibits two new film installations. The new film DEDICATION (2024) is a vertical projection composed of excerpts cut from books owned by the artist’s late mother, a voracious reader. This elegiac work becomes a meditation on loss, authorship, and the enduring imprint of the maternal archive. The companion piece, When Things Fall Apart (2024), interweaves a grief journal with layered images of celestial bodies—mapping an emotional cosmos where the past dissolves into an inevitable, yet unresolved, future.

Arresting the moment
Evi Vingerling presents more than fifty works, including a substantial new body of paintings alongside key pieces from her two-decade practice. Her paintings emerge from observations of color and form that momentarily pull her “out of thought.” These flashes—an interplay of natural light, movement, and mood—are translated into layers of vivid abstraction. Vingerling’s work does not depict the world, but rather distills it, arresting ephemeral phenomena in paint.

Rather than functioning as static images, her paintings function almost cinematically—fragmenting and recomposing the flow of time across surfaces. As with Mater’s projections, light in Vingerling’s work is both subject and material, navigating between perception and sensation.

A poetic framework
Running through Light on Things is a thread of original poetry and prose by celebrated author, artist, and cultural historian Omar Kholeif. Interspersed throughout the exhibition spaces, Kholeif’s texts offer rhythmic punctuation—interventions that echo, reflect, and deepen the central themes of the exhibition. A small publication with his collected writings will be available for visitors to take home.

On the artists
Evi Vingerling (b. 1979) lives and works in the Netherlands. A graduate of the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague and former resident at the Rijksakademie, she received the Royal Award for Modern Painting in 2012. Her work is represented in numerous public and private collections worldwide.

Katja Mater (b. 1979) studied at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie and De Ateliers, and was a researcher at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp. Mater is currently the subject of a solo show at FOMU in Antwerp. The artist's work has been shown at Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, Kunstmuseum St. Gallen, Mu.ZEE in Ostend, and other institutions internationally.