Jan van Munster

Jan van Munster was one of the most remarkable and influential artists in the Netherlands. His work was already on display in all the important museums in the Netherlands in the 1960s. He gained international renown shortly after that. Despite the wide range of materials that van Munster uses for his creations, including stone, steel, granite and glass, it is astonishing how homogeneous his work is on a thematic level. For decades, he has been concentrating with the utmost consistency and continuously changing perspectives on one subject: energy. Temperature, magnetism, radioactivity and electricity are the departure point for his works. He aims to make the invisible visible. He was interested in the tension that exists in the area between opposites, such as heat and cold, light and dark, positive and negative, charge and discharge, compression and expansion, visibility and invisibility. These opposites exemplify the polarity that dominates his work. To summarize this, van Munster has chosen two suggestive formulas, IK and +/-, which are often cited in his work.

In 2002, van Munster received the Wilhelminaring, a lifetime achievement award granted to Dutch sculptors. He was awarded the Deutsche Lichtkunstpreis, an oeuvre prize for light art in Germany, in 2020.

Jan van Munster’s (°1939-2024 NL) works are represented in renowned collections such as M HKA, Antwerp, Belgium; Musee d’Art Moderne de la ville de Paris, France; Van Abbe Museum, Eindhoven, The Netherlands; Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam, The Netherlands; Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, The Netherlands; Zentrum für Internationale Lichtkunst, Unna, Germany; Museum für Konkrete Kunst Ingolstadt, Germany; Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo, The Netherlands; Wilhelm Hack Museum, Ludwigshafen, Germany …

1957-1960
Instituut voor Kunstnijverheidsonderwijs, Amsterdam

1955-1957
Academie van Beeldende Kunsten, Rotterdam

He was the founder and creator of the concept of the IK Foundation, a production and exhibition space for contemporary visual art (since 2008). The foundation has emerged from his previous Foundation Plus Min (Dutch for Plus Minus) in Van Munsters former place of residence Renesse, Zealand (NL) (1987-2007). www.stichtingik.nl