KMSKA and Nieuwe Instituut present at the Royal Museum of Fine Arts Antwerp (KMSKA) the exhibition ‘Trailblazers of the abstract. De Stijl vs. Modern Art Circle’.
The influential Dutch avant-garde movement re-engages with its Antwerp counterpart some one hundred years after the date. It is a unique opportunity for visitors to delve into the origins of abstract art in the Low Countries in the early 1920s.
Nieuwe Instituut, the national museum for architecture, design and digital culture in Rotterdam, loaned several masterpieces from the National Collection of Dutch Architecture and Urban Planning to the Antwerp museum for this purpose. Among the loans is the only preserved interior model by Theo van Doesburg.
Abstract experiments
In the print cabinets of KMSKA, abstraction will soon have a special place. For this, the museum is joining forces with the Nieuwe Instituut. Masterpieces on paper of De Stijl from the Dutch National Collection will be presented alongside the abstract experiments of the Antwerp avant-garde, united in the Kring Moderne Kunst. Although Jozef Peeters, Huib Hoste and Jos Léonard have become less iconic names than Theo van Doesburg or Gerrit Rietveld, Flemish artists also played an important role within the European network of Constructivism. The result is a visually stimulating display in which paintings, drawings, furniture, architectural and graphic design come together to form an extraordinary dialogue between two influential avant-garde groups.
Visual language for a new chapter
Through more than forty works, the expo places the art movements side by side. This makes it possible to see where these rival movements, in the purest sense of the word, find each other and where they differ. For example, De Stijl stands out for its austere forms and surfaces. The Antwerp artists of the Kring Moderne Kunst, on the other hand, choose their own course by allowing more playful forms, dynamism and volume. Both groups believe wholeheartedly in clear, geometric structures as the blueprint for a new art in a changed, postwar world.
One of the highlights and also the symbolic starting point of the expo is the only preserved interior maquette by Theo van Doesburg, a top loan from the Nieuwe Instituut. Also called the “Sistine Chapel of modernism,” van Doesburg originally designed the maquette for the Café l’Aubette in Strasbourg. It embodies precisely the pursuit of an ideal balance between functionality and aesthetics. In addition, the exhibition also features a recently rediscovered, early work by Georges Vantongerloo, the only Belgian to join De Stijl and sign their manifesto.
Trailblazers of the abstract. De Stijl vs. Modern Art Circle can be visited from May 29, 2025 through Sept. 7, 2025 in the print cabinet of KMSKA in Antwerp.
Photography: Sanne De Block Photography
