Exhibition period: 29 May – 10 September
Exhibition opening: Friday 29 May, 18:00-20:00
The Merchant House, Herengracht 254, 1016 BV Amsterdam

The Merchant House’s (TMH) summer exhibition Fragments and the corresponding theme The Merchant House / Your House reflect on how artworks occupy spaces—from public to private, from gallery to home. Featuring works by TMH’s artists—Pino Pinelli (IT, 1938–2024), Elsa Tomkowiak (FR, b. 1981), Zhu Hong (CN, b. 1975), Sylvie Bonnot (FR, b. 1982), and André Stempfel (FR, b. 1930)—it engages the architectural legacy of the Amsterdam canal house, suggestions of domestic decor, and TMH’s programming history.

The project takes its inspiration from artist Pino Pinelli’s signature series. Neither entirely painting nor sculpture, his works unfold across walls in small, color-saturated units. The walls—those rigid partitions, frameworks of “everyspace”—become an area of free play, inviting us, as Pinelli suggested, to touch the works and join him in his art.

Three French women artists—Elsa Tomkowiak, Zhu Hong, and Sylvie Bonnot—first joined TMH in our Making Things Happen cycle (2017–2019), which focused on the material history of the art object and experimentation among young artists. Fragments includes Tomkowiak’s Zip (2021), a wall of painted color composed of six oversized zip bags—her take on an unexpected alternative to canvas, a household “commodity” in this case.

Zhu Hong’s exquisite rectangle of clear blue sky, Nuage (2021), becomes an enquiring visual accomplice to Pinelli’s paintings-reliefs no less than to TMH’s Baroque ceiling scene, also acting as a counterpoint to Tomkowiak’s painting on plastic. With Bonnot’s series of spiders—using her proprietary photo-transfer method—medium and subject shift. Her images spread across the wall, capturing a tiny house invader at an ominous scale; attractive rather than repellent, nature moves from the dark corners of the house into the gallery.

The exhibition also includes works by André Stempfel, whose miroir morceau choisi (1984)—a literal cutout reflecting on itself—was part of his 2026 retrospective at TMH that introduced the theme The Merchant House, Your House. Fragments foregrounds this polyvalence, offering each artist a room of their own and inviting viewers to formulate a response, perhaps even a theory, across the fragments.

“The Merchant House originally presented these artists’ first solo projects in Amsterdam. The group exhibition returns to Pino Pinelli’s proposition for contemporary painting: ‘As with my third eye, I would like to reach the atomic substance of form—an element of strength and constitution for a different kind of painting.’” —Marsha Plotnitsky and Pino Pinelli, also cited in TMH’s art catalogue Pino Pinelli: Disseminations (2017)

Accompanying event series:
On the Subject of Art—A Dinner Party, in an Art-Critical Mode
Thu 28 May and Thu 25 June, 19:30, at The Merchant House in Amsterdam
Created and hosted by Marsha Plotnitsky, TMH Founding Artistic Director

This spring and summer, our new series of dinner parties explores Context, Concept, Coincidence, and Consequence in relation to art—bringing together a small group of guests around a shared table. Tickets released on Eventbrite shortly before each event: www.merchanthouse.nl/events

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