MARZEE

Galerie Marzee has been shaping contemporary art jewellery from the Dutch city of Nijmegen for almost fifty years. When Marie-José van den Hout opened her first gallery, in 1978, she did so in the premises of a former butcher’s shop. Today, this major institution can be found in a multistorey renovated granary on the river Waal. The powerful minimalist aesthetic of its impressive architecture forms a worthy backdrop for the objects, stored in large display drawers, housed in the Marzee Collection, which has been open to visitors since 2004.

In addition to the gallery’s temporary exhibitions of internationally renowned jewellery artists, the Marzee International Graduate Show takes place every summer, featuring outstanding works by students of schools and academies from across the globe. As a platform for established and promising new artistic approaches, the gallery also provides a space for discourse that integrates experimental formats, photography and music alongside its jewellery art.


The publication MARZEE tells the story of the jewellery dealer Marie-José van den Hout, her gallery and her collection. Opening the book is like opening the granary’s steel door, whose raw materiality is reflected in the grey cover with black embossed lettering. Photographs taken by Michiel Heffels of the impressive space serve as the entryway, before a catalogue section featuring over 300 works from the Marzee Collection leads the reader to a panorama of international studio jewellery from the late 1970s to the present day.

Van den Hout herself selected and compiled the outstanding objects: works that are ‘eloquent and poetic’ and ‘balance technical and intellectual rigour with sensitivity and a deeply personal vocabulary of material and motivation’, as the gallerist describes her praxis. In her foreword, Petra Hölscher approaches the gallery and van den Hout from a somewhat personal perspective. The essay by Susan Cummins traces the creation of the collection and locates the objects and their makers within art history, while the texts by Flos Wildschut and Lizzie Atkins showcase the gallery’s evolution. Rounding off the publication is a summary of all objects featuring detailed information on the individual pieces. An exquisite overview of contemporary art jewellery exemplified by one of the world’s most important private collections.