Sculpture garden

A stroll through the 25-hectare large sculpture garden is a real discovery tour. A unique collection of sculptures by artists including Auguste Rodin, Henry Moore, Barbara Hepworth, Richard Serra and Jean Dubuffet can be found dotted around the garden, sometimes in unexpected places. Also adorning the garden are two pavilions by Aldo van Eyck and Gerrit Rietveld; architectural gems dating from the 1960s that were rebuilt and given a new home here. The sculpture garden is open all year round and exudes a different ambience with every season.

Click here for a map of the sculpture garden

Download the booklet that appeared on the occasion of the garden’s fiftieth birthday in 2011

Chapters by Jan Fabre

In 2011 the museum held a retrospective of the work of Jan Fabre. The decision had already been taken previously to include a representation of his work in the collection (see the annual report for 2010). In Fabre’s work, an important position is reserved for the way in which energy is depleted and recharged. Physical energy plays the leading role in his intrinsically positive approach to life and in his own artistic work. The emotions, thinking, sexual activity, the motor functions, all the material aspects of the body, such as organs, the skeleton, fluids, and everything that can be done with them, are both his subjects and his materials. For Fabre, the body is the centre of his universe. The brain is just as important for creativity as the sexual organs: they might well be interchangeable for Fabre. He explores his brain literally and figuratively and aims to grasp it by reporting on his quest in sculptures and drawings. His brain is his own treasure trove, which opens up before him like a personal cosmos and out of which he extracts his works. Poetry and beauty predominate in his work. Humans and animals appear in all sorts of guises and the cycle of life and death is a constant theme. In consultation with the artist, a group of recent works (sculptures, drawings and a film) was selected, whereby it was possible to give a series of eight Chapters a place in the sculpture garden, thanks to a very generous gesture from the artist. Furthermore, a number of important works from his ‘blue’ period – the seventies and eighties, when he worked mainly with Bic ballpoint ink – were acquired from the artist’s collection and at auction.

Photo: Walter Herfst

Replacement Piece by Ger van Elk

The museum acquired an early work by this artist, which has a permanent place in the concrete path in front of the museum. It concerns Replacement Piece, the idea and first version of which date from 1969. The work consists of the removal of one square metre of ground and its replacement with a photograph of the removed section. In 1969 Van Elk replaced a piece of asphalt from the road in front of the Kunsthalle in Bern with a photograph on a hard sheet. He did this as part of the legendary exhibition Live in your head: When Attitudes become Form, organized by Harold Szeemann. The first work was soon lost due to the effects of weather and traffic. This second durable version from 2011 consists of the removal of one square metre from the concrete entry path to the Kröller-Müller Museum and its replacement with a digital reproduction. The photograph is mounted on a stainless steel frame and provided with an anti-slip coating. Van Elk’s work is about image and imagination. With his artistic interventions he tries to stay as close as possible to reality, in order to make us aware of how we look at things. He calls his Replacement Piece a form of ‘super-realism’.