Marinus Boezem

Biography of Marinus Boezem

Marinus Boezem (*1934) - with his friends Jan Dibbets and Ger van Elk - belongs to the first generation so-called Conceptual Artists. As with the ZERO movement (Boezem still considers ZERO as his starting point) the Dutch Conceptual artists were international forerunners. Boezem participated in the famous 1969 Bern exhibition “When Attitudes Become Form” and in the same year its Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam counterpart “Op Losse Schroeven”. Both exhibitions are still world-famous and are still being referred to by art historians all over the world. In 2013 Germano Celant from the ‘Fondazione Prada’ in Venice organized a remake of the 1969 Bern exhibition with the same artists, among them of course Marinus Boezem.

Boezem discovered that he could use elusive elements such as air, weather, wind and light as visual materials. In 1969 he created one of his most famous works of art, when he had a skywriting airplane sign the sky with his name. The work "Signing an Itho-fan" from 1965 is one of his well known statements for "When Attitudes Become Form". In the 1969 Stedelijk Museum exhibition he had white sheets hanging out of the museum windows, 'for a fresh new breeze......'

Marinus Boezem has been, and still is a very important figure in conceptual art. His works are part of many important museum collections such as those of the MoMA New York, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, Musée d’Art Contemporain Lyon, Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Museum Kröller-Müller, and many public art collections.