Home is where the Art is

Collecting art can enrich your life. Especially when you are surrounded by it at home. The exhibition ‘Home is where the Art is’ shows this. Collectors Johan Poort and Manon Visser invite the public in the Kunsthal to enter their own home, as it were, where they live in the midst of their joint art collection. Poort and Visser have been collecting art intuitively for five years: movements, periods, ‘high’ and ‘low’ intersect in this varied collection. Abstract works by Bram Bogart and Ton van Os from Rotterdam are interspersed with lively, figurative art by Marlene Dumas, Yoshitomo Nara, Sungi Mlengeya, Pat Andrea and Diederick Kraaijeveld, among others. In an intimate, homely setting, the public discovers associative connections between diverse works of art in which the love of the collectors is palpable.

Collecting art, how an art collection comes to life and how art can make a house a home are the common threads of the exhibition. Johan Poort (1959) studied architecture and grew up – as the son of Mesdag expert Johan Poort – with art. Manon Visser (1973) is an art historian and goldsmith. The public gets a special insight into their still young collection, which was initially not intended for a museum presentation. New associations and stories arise through special combinations of works. ‘Home is where the Art is’ takes the visitor into the minds of the collectors and shows what an art collection can mean on a personal level. How do you develop your own taste? How can art acquire a new, personal layer of meaning?

Love at first sight

Works in circulation and product packaging are also part of the collection and show that the value of art does not have to be the guiding principle for collecting. For the collectors it is about the personal relationship with the work. This makes it worth keeping and displaying. Love at first sight is what has shaped the Poort-Visser collection into what it is today.