New Light – De Ploeg

You’ll get to know the De Ploeg artists’ surprising versatility and passion for experimentation during the period 1918–1930. They produced not only expressionist paintings but also graphic design, applied art, and collaborative projects with writers, musicians and architects. The show’s focus on the work’s origins and context brings alive the artists’ original drive to deliver ‘the shock of the new’.

Renewed format, surprising stories

Whereas the previous exhibition highlighted the paintings as masterworks, the Groninger Museum is now starting the story at the beginning, recalling the artists’ socioeconomic backgrounds, their education at the Minerva Art Academy, the influence of the international avant-garde, and De Ploeg’s role in society. The show also looks closely at how the artists experimented with materials and methods and at lesser-known aspects of their work such as applied art and collaborative projects.

The new, chronologically ordered exhibition occupies seven rooms in the De Lucchi Pavilion. Each gallery tells a different part of the story, from the group’s founding and early successes to Jan Wiegers’ influential encounter with Ernst Ludwig Kirchner in Switzerland; from the artists’ multidisciplinary work to their quest for abstraction and constructivism; and, finally, De Ploeg’s postwar position in museums, collections, and Groningen’s art world. 

You’ll see work by artists including Hendrik Nicolaas Werkman, Jan Altink, Alida Pott, Johan Dijkstra, George Martens, Jan van der Zee, Wobbe Alkema, Job Hansen and Jan Wiegers.