Hilgemann Fund

First acquisition: Jeroen Jongeleen

The first disbursement from the Hilgemann Fund was a contribution in 2021 towards the acquisition of six video works by Jeroen Jongeleen (Apeldoorn, 1967). Jongeleen often works in the public space. During the first lockdown in 2020, he began running in deserted urban locations, initially long distances, but eventually in the form of a circle. A drone follows his movements and shows how Jongeleen leaves a trail behind in the car parks and prohibited city areas, but also in the landscape near the Kröller-Müller Museum. A spatial gesture of an artist trapped in a hamster wheel of his own creation, thus drawing an analogy with the Coronavirus pandemic, which was created by humanity and subsequently held us captive.

Second acquisition: Sarah van Sonsbeeck

The second contribution from the Hilgemann Fund has been used to acquire work by Sarah van Sonsbeeck (Utrecht, 1976). For her exhibition Moles of Modernism at the Kröller-Müller Museum, Van Sonsbeeck laid out eighty ‘molehills’ made of various materials: bronze, glass, ceramics, wax, rubber, plaster and even birdseed. All these materials can also be found in artworks in the museum's 20th-century collection. Moles keep the soil healthy with their digging, but are often regarded as a pest.

In Sarah’s exhibition, the moles of modernism have been at work: they have left their ‘molehills’ on both the inside and outside of a modernist glass façade by architect Wim Quist. Here, they do not undermine the mown lawn, but the austere order of the architecture and the strict division between inside and outside. In Moles of Modernism Sarah van Sonsbeeck comments playfully on the modernist tradition in both visual art and architecture. With the acquisition of 22 of her ‘molehills’, this commentary has a permanently place in the collection of the Kröller-Müller Museum.