Valkenburg
September 12, 2025–January 25, 2026
Centraal Museum Utrecht presents Valkenburg, the first institutional solo exhibition in the Netherlands by renowned artist Willem de Rooij in nearly a decade. Conceived specifically for the museum, the project reframes thirty paintings and drawings by Amsterdam artist Dirk Valkenburg (1675–1721). Through carefully staged juxtapositions on a bespoke display system, de Rooij invites visitors to consider how eighteenth-century Dutch elites shaped visual culture to reinforce and legitimise colonial ideology.
Valkenburg produced some of the earliest depictions of Indigenous and enslaved people on Surinamese sugar plantations—idealised scenes that obscure the violence of colonialism. He also painted elaborate hunting still lifes and portraits of patrons whose fortunes derived from imperial trade and slavery. Seen together, these diverse genres expose the operations of the white gaze.
Willem de Rooij (Beverwijk, Netherlands, 1969) creates temporary installations that probe the politics of representation. Drawing on his background in time-based media, he employs montage to juxtapose appropriated objects and images, generating new meanings between seemingly disparate elements. His collaborations with leading scholars foster research across global art history and visual anthropology.
An in-depth publication titled Dirk Valkenburg will accompany the installation at the end of this year with AUP (Amsterdam University Press). Edited by Willem de Rooij and historian Karwan Fatah-Black (Leiden University), it brings together a catalogue raisonné of Valkenburg’s work—developed in collaboration with the RKD (Netherlands Institute for Art History) in The Hague—and a critical reader. Spanning art history, anthropology, postcolonial and queer studies across Europe and the Americas, contributions by Karin Amatmoekrim, Agir Axwijk, Rebecca Brienen, Sabine Craft-Giepmans, Philip Dikland, Frank Dragtenstein, Renzo Duin, Will Fredo Furtado, Julie Hartkamp, Matthies Klink, Lilia Moritz Schwarcz, Mark Ponte, Maurice Saß, Benjamin Schmidt, Alex Stipriaan, and Sarah Thomas situate Valkenburg’s oeuvre within interdisciplinary and transcultural dialogue.
Valkenburg and Dirk Valkenburg mark the first exhibition and first publication dedicated to the eponymous artist. Together, they offer a careful reflection on appropriation and collaboration, foregrounding the artist’s role as art historian, documentarist, and archivist.
About Willem de Rooij
A member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, Willem de Rooij teaches at the Städelschule (Frankfurt a. Main) and at the Rijksakademie (Amsterdam). In 2016, he co-founded BPA// Berlin program for artists. Awards and residencies include the Bâloise Art Prize (2000), the Robert E. Fulton III Fellowship at Harvard University (2004), and the DAAD Fellowship in Berlin (2006). Together with Jeroen de Rijke (1970–2006), he represented the Netherlands at the 2005 Venice Biennale. Recent exhibitions include Akademie der Künste, Vienna; Portikus, Frankfurt am Main; the 17th Jakarta Biennale; and the 10th Shanghai Biennale. His work is represented in collections such as MoMA, New York; Centre Pompidou, Paris; and Muzeum Sztuki, Łódź.
Valkenburg is a partner project of the Hartwig Art Foundation.
