Valkenburg is a new installation by Willem de Rooij. It features thirty works by Dutch artist Dirk Valkenburg (1675-1721), accompanied by a catalogue raisonné including new essays by international scholars, edited by De Rooij and Karwan Fatah-Black.

In 1707 Dirk Valkenburg painted a now iconic image of enslaved West Africans on a sugar plantation in Surinam. Less known are his ornate hunting still lifes and portraits of colonial stakeholders.

By juxtaposing disparate painterly genres, Valkenburg dissects how 18th-century Dutch elites crafted visual culture to promote and perpetuate colonial ideology. 

Since the early 1990s, Willem de Rooij has created temporary installations that analyze the politics of representation through appropriation and collaboration. Sparking new research in art history and visual anthropology, his work is marked by closely edited publications and a select corpus of precisely crafted objects. 

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