Digital Rembrandts coming to NZ
A selection of remastered paintings by Dutch artist Rembrandt is coming to New Zealand.
An exhibition of 50 digital reproductions of the 17th-century Old Master’s works – titled Rembrandt Remastered – will be staged at the Academy of Fine Arts in Wellington from June 6 to July 5.
The exhibition is part of a longrunning Dutch project to bring together all Rembrandt’s 330 known paintings, the originals of which are spread across about 20 countries. Only 43 paintings are in the Netherlands, in eight museums in five different cities.
The remastered works are now on display in the Rembrandt Remastered museum in Amsterdam, and have been digitally enhanced so they appear as they probably looked when they were first painted nearly 400 years ago.
A feature of the exhibition will be Rembrandt’s most famous group portrait, the enormous The Night Watch, which is four metres wide and 3m high. But when originally painted it was even bigger – a slice was lopped off one side to make it fit on a wall.
The remastered version will include the missing piece. The exhibition is being brought to Wellington by Boyd Klap, president of the New Zealand Netherlands Foundation, who was astonished by the paintings when he saw them in Amsterdam about 18 months ago.
‘‘I went in and saw these fantastic technical reproductions and I asked if they had a strategy to take them overseas.
‘‘They said they had, but hadn’t started yet – so I said ‘you had better start in New Zealand’.’’
Klap, who also organised highly successful touring exhibitions from the Anne Frank Museum in Amsterdam, has spent more than a year organising the show.
He said it would give people an opportunity to see versions of works that were priceless and unlikely ever to be shown in New Zealand. Insurance costs alone would make it impossible to bring them here.
Rembrandt Remastered will also be displayed at Smith & Caughey’s department store in Auckland from August 13 to September 13, before being available elsewhere in New Zealand and Australia.