De Pont Tilburg: contemporary art in a former wool mill
Three exhibitions on colour, fragmented figures and music culture are scheduled for 17 October. The building and collection tell stories of their own.
De Pont Museum occupies a former wool mill in Tilburg. The collection is shown in the large, light-filled hall, the distinctive corridors and the smaller former wool storage rooms. The museum opened in 1992 without an inherited collection. It has built one gradually, concentrating on key works by individual artists.
De Pont now holds more than a thousand works by around a hundred artists. At its opening it had about ten works by three artists, including Richard Long and Marlene Dumas. The museum collects in depth and aims to hold at least one key work by each artist.
Sigmar Polke – Het weten van de kleuren runs from 20 September 2026 to 28 February 2027, according to the museum. It gathers more than fifty works dating from the 1980s to the late 2000s. Polke investigated what pigments, resins and other unusual materials can do to colour and painting. The exhibition also brings together groups of works from Dutch museums, including the Stedelijk Museum, Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen and the Van Abbemuseum.
In Left Hand Path, De Pont presents sculptures, reliefs and works on paper by Matthew Monahan. This display is also scheduled from 20 September to 28 February. Monahan uses materials ranging from bronze and plaster to paper and plastic. Human figures appear as fragments that he recombines; the exhibition follows two acquisitions and a gift from the artist.
Future of Yesterday by Bárbara Wagner and Benjamin de Burca is listed through 28 February. The new video focuses on the German hardcore scene and the Straight Edge movement. It is shown alongside an earlier collection work about Recife’s brega music scene. The museum stresses that the communities in the artists’ films help shape scripts, music and staging.
De Pont is at Wilhelminapark 1. Its visitor page gives regular Saturday hours of 11 am to 5 pm.