‘What the moon can tell you has been said by the sun’ will present the work of Willem Hussem (1900-1974) alongside that of three female artists: the Dutch Esther Tielemans (1976), the Mexican Alejandra Venegas (1986) and the South Korean Jongsuk Yoon (1965).

Willem Hussem was active as a painter, sculptor and poet and is considered one of the most important abstract working Dutch artists after the Second World War. Since our gallery took over the representation of Hussem’s estate two years ago, we have increasingly been placing his work in a contemporary context and in an international perspective. Hussem was always fascinated by Asian cultures and Pre-Columbian art and the influence of this is clearly perceptible in his work.

At the same time, Hussem is an artist who will today be referred to by some as the prototype of the “old white male artist”. With this exhibition, we want to show that such (dis)qualifications are irrelevant on a purely visual level; the similarities between the works of Hussem and the other artists – regardless of age, gender and cultural origin – can be called remarkable. All four painters attempt, in their own way, to capture nature and the landscape by means of abstract forms. It is furthermore interesting that each of the three female artists not only comes from a different continent, but is also in a different phase of her life.