Woody van Amen retrospective opens at Kunsthal Rotterdam

FROM 25 APR -  4 OCT 2026 | Kunsthal Rotterdam is marking Woody van Amen’s ninetieth birthday with a major retrospective that traces more than six decades of work by one of the key figures in Dutch post-war art. Woody van Amen. 

For Rotterdam, this is more than a birthday tribute. It is also a home-city moment for an artist who helped shape the Dutch post-war avant-garde and kept pushing at the edges of pop art, symbolism and visual culture long after those labels stopped feeling neat.

The exhibition brings together highlights from Van Amen’s long career and follows the development of his work from the early 1960s onwards. You move from early pop-influenced paintings and assemblages to the symbols and structures that became central to his later work, including the well-known Taxat designs.

From Rotterdam to pop art

One of the most striking early works in the exhibition is Habanera (1961), once presented as “the world’s longest painting”. Van Amen painted it on a 13-metre barrel organ book, layering an abstract, expressionist visual score across the perforations that would normally determine the music.

That early experimental energy helps explain why Van Amen still feels alive as an artist rather than locked inside an art-history chapter. His work can be playful and sharp at the same time, always testing how far an image, object or symbol can go before it starts meaning something else entirely.

American influences and street imagery

The pop art thread becomes clearer in the 1960s, when Van Amen travelled to the United States and met artists including Andy Warhol and Robert Rauschenberg. There, he encountered an art scene immersed in consumer culture, ordinary objects, logos and brand imagery, and those influences began to surface clearly in his own work.

In paintings of urban street scenes, Van Amen used names such as Philips, Wrigley and RVS, pulling neon signs, industrial forms and familiar commercial imagery into his visual language. For a Rotterdam audience, that directness still lands well, because his work never feels distant or over-explained. It speaks in signs, surfaces and objects you recognise before you even start analysing them.

Machines, symbols and spiritual detours

The exhibition also looks at Van Amen’s assemblages and Vibro objects, works built from everyday materials that can move, vibrate, make sound or even freeze things. His ice machines return here too, along with work shaped by darker themes, including the electric chair, which he isolates and reworks as a sculptural object rather than a functional one.

Later sections show how travel fed his interest in symbolism. Indonesian shadow puppets, Nepalese prayer flags, the Matterhorn and above all the Taxat all reappear in his work. The Taxat, a double-cross form Van Amen noticed in the upholstery of a Singapore taxi, became one of his defining motifs and one of the clearest signs of how he could turn an incidental visual discovery into a lifelong artistic system.

A Rotterdam exhibition with broad reach

Woody van Amen. The Best of has been developed in collaboration with Kunsthal Rotterdam, Woody van Amen and guest curator Irma Boom, at the initiative of EENWERK founder Julius Vermeulen. That collaborative angle suits an artist whose work has always moved across boundaries rather than settling into one school or one method.

For Rotterdam, the timing feels right. A retrospective like this does not just look back at an influential local artist. It also reminds you how much of Van Amen’s work still feels current, whether he is responding to mass culture, technology, spirituality or the strange poetry hidden in ordinary objects.