The Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam was catapulted into the spotlight early last year when it hosted an exhibition devoted to Dutch Golden Age painter Johannes Vermeer. Incorporating 28 of the artist’s 37 attributed paintings held across the world for a once-in-a-lifetime reunion, the crowd-conscious museum found itself unable to meet the international demand for attendance and sold out of tickets within days of Vermeer’s public debut. This predicament opened up a unique ticket resale market on eBay, where single entry passes were marked-up for upwards of $2,000.
Among the lucky few who attended Vermeer at the Rijksmuseum was artist and professor Joe Fig, who made use of eBay resales to visit the show with his 19-year-old son and decided to immortalize the experience through his own practice. Fig’s Vermeer Contemplations (2024), now on view at the Sarasota Art Museum in Florida through mid-April, is a series of 16 contemplative oil paintings capturing museum attendees engaging with the Dutch master’s work.
Joe Fig’s son makes a cameo appearance in “Vermeer: The Woman with a Pearl Necklace/Rijksmuseum” (2023)
“The people I’m looking at are not the ones who just take out their phone to take selfies,” Fig said in an interview with Hyperallergic, explaining that he was the one with his phone out to capture attendees in action.
“As an artist, when we’re fortunate enough to have work at a museum or a gallery, we just want people to take the time to appreciate the work,” he continued. “So I’m honoring those who were really giving a deep thought and respect to the works, really looking at them.”
Even with the fervor around the exhibition, Fig noted that the museum did a good job with curating for crowd control considering the modest scale of Vermeer’s paintings in comparison to the frenzied response they garnered. He told Hyperallergic that he opted to paint his series at a smaller scale to evoke the intimacy elicited from Vermeer’s output, also nodding to the meta nature of inviting his own audience to take a closer look at compositions of museum visitors during their own up-close contemplations of the masterpieces before them.
