Artwork Data

Title

Droomhuis

Artist

Marieken Verheyen

Year

2001

Material

Fotografie en staal

Dimensions

8 x 20 m

Artwork Location

Address

Meester de Bruinplein 3, Den Haag

City district

Centrum

GPS data

52.0678347, 4.3146069 View on map

Artwork Description

Text

Such a boring bare wall in a schoolyard is nothing. That is why, after the expansion of the school in 2001, primary school De Triangel decided to spend the corresponding art budget on a work of art for the blind wall of the playground for the school's youngest children. Through mediators Kunst & Bedrijf and Stroom Den Haag, visual artist Marieken Verheyen came into the picture. As in all her work for the public space, Verheyen tried to establish a relationship between location, artwork and user. As a child, she loved her grandmother's attic. Between the strange forgotten things, she fantasised about lost treasures. Nowadays, in many cities and new housing estates, there is no place for such messy places or residual spaces. And yet that is where children find refuge for their fantasies.

In her projects, Verheyen often looks at the public and the private from a different perspective. She placed views from windows of living rooms all over the world, for example in the building of the Immigration and Naturalisation Service in Zwolle (2003) or on windows in the Staatsliedenbuurt district in Amsterdam (2004/2005). This forces the viewer to look at the world literally from a different window. In a certain sense, this also happens in 'Droomhuis'. Verheyen invited ten artists to build their own dream room in a diorama. She photographed these dream rooms and stacked them on the wall in the schoolyard to form an enormous house. A staircase and a door complete the dream house. Now pupils can look into all those personal dream rooms from the square and from the first floor. There is a real tree house with a view of a school (Terpstra), a snow palace (Kramer) and a room with a lovely hammock (Reyers). The interiors stimulate the pupils' imagination to make their own peep-show boxes of their own dream rooms.

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