The previous day, we’d gone to Moco Museum to see contemporary art. On this day, we checked into Element Amsterdam and found ourselves doing much the same thing in a shopping mall. This one wasn’t planned.
Gelderlandplein, the shopping center attached to Element Amsterdam, was already proving more interesting than I’d expected. But as we walked through it, we kept passing sculptures that seemed rather more ambitious than your typical shopping-center decoration. A KAWS figure here. A twisted red British telephone box there. An elaborate tangle of golden bicycles.
It turns out we had stumbled into a permanent art collection.
Element Amsterdam opens directly into Gelderlandplein, which is how we ended up encountering the collection in the first place.
The connection with the hotel made it particularly difficult to miss. Element Amsterdam opens directly into Gelderlandplein, so trips to the supermarket, the station or anywhere else outside the hotel repeatedly took us through the shopping center. Encountering the art was part of those journeys.
Tom Claassen’s Hond was our first clue that Gelderlandplein’s art wasn’t your typical shopping-center installation.
What I hadn’t appreciated while we were there was how deliberately the collection had been assembled. Gelderlandplein’s owner, Kroonenberg Groep, had selected the works in collaboration with Reflex Amsterdam and spread them throughout the shopping center, rather than creating a separate gallery space.
There are 19 in the permanent collection. We didn’t set out to find all of them, and I didn’t even photograph all of the ones we passed. We weren’t intentionally following an art trail at all. We just kept running into it.
KAWS’ Better Knowing sits in the middle of the shopping center, with another work from the collection visible farther down the corridor.
Alex Chinneck’s Wring Ring twists one of Britain’s most familiar objects into an improbable knot.
We hadn’t set out to look at art that day, but we weren’t oblivious to what we were seeing either. KAWS was an obvious name. So was Erwin Wurm. What we hadn’t realized at the start was that these weren’t isolated installations. They were part of a deliberately assembled collection.
Erwin Wurm’s Big Disobedience replaces the human figure with an oversized, headless suit. It happened to be standing directly outside Element Amsterdam.
The setting of the works, in amongst the shops and shoppers, made the encounters quite interesting. There were no white walls, hushed rooms or carefully controlled sightlines. There were shops, escalators, supermarket runs and people going about their day. Studio Job’s enormous golden Worn was actually being used as a seat. Frankey’s Bear with me occupied a shopping-center bench. Erwin Wurm’s Big Disobedience stood almost directly outside our hotel.
Studio Job’s Worn is one of the collection’s more interactive pieces, functioning as both sculpture and somewhere to sit.
Frankey’s Bear with me, installed along one of Gelderlandplein’s shopping corridors.
And then there was the mass of golden bicycles.
The biggest surprise was discovering that the tangle of golden bicycles was Ai Weiwei’s Forever Bicycle.
I knew of Ai Weiwei’s bicycle works, although I certainly hadn’t expected to discover one between shops in the mall attached to our Marriott. By this point, it was fairly obvious that Gelderlandplein had something more substantial going on than a few pieces of shopping-center decoration.
What we still didn’t do was stop and investigate it. We were staying upstairs, passing through the mall repeatedly, and the sculptures remained things we just encountered on the way somewhere else.
Patricia Piccinini’s The Lovers, one of 19 works in Gelderlandplein’s permanent collection.
I only looked into the collection properly afterwards. Gelderlandplein’s owner, Kroonenberg Groep, has gone considerably further than simply buying some art and putting it around the mall. Each work has a QR code linking to an audio explanation, and there is now an Art Audio Tour covering the collection. You can come here quite deliberately just to see the art.
We had done almost exactly the opposite.
Marcus Harvey’s Victoria looks abstract at first glance. It is actually a deflated football, a comment on the lost glory of English football.
Looking things up afterwards also explained a couple of works that had been much less obvious when we passed them. Marcus Harvey’s Victoria had registered with me simply as a strange sculptural form. It looks obvious now, but it is actually a deflated football, intended as a comment on the lost glory of English football. Daniel Firman’s Gathering turned out to use a cast of the artist’s own body beneath its enormous accumulation of discarded objects.
Daniel Firman’s Gathering uses a cast of the artist’s own body to support a seemingly chaotic accumulation of discarded objects.
There is something appealing about discovering all of this backwards. We had spent the previous afternoon at Moco because we wanted to see art. We went to Gelderlandplein because our hotel was there.
I wouldn’t suggest replacing one with the other. Moco was a museum visit; Gelderlandplein was something quite different. But finding KAWS, Erwin Wurm, Ai Weiwei and the rest mixed into the ordinary business of walking through a shopping center was one of those small, unplanned discoveries that makes a trip more interesting.
We checked into Element because it worked for our Amsterdam logistics. Nobody had mentioned that the mall downstairs came with an art collection.