Olphaert den Otter donates study material to the RKD

Een onvergetelijke dag 

On the occasion of the renovation of the Berlage Lyceum, the school asked Olphaert den Otter to create a new frieze for the central entrance hall. The work had to relate directly to two friezes from 1924, which were created shortly after the school was completed. Peter Alma (1886-1969) reflected in a modernist style on the technological developments of the time, while Joop Sjollema (1900-1990) created a classical-looking work that represented the course of the seasons and the stages of human life. 

For the new frieze, the secondary school asked Den Otter to reflect on the present time and to apply his ‘subtle, but unmistakably critical, ambiguity with which he looks at the world’. The artwork ultimately functions as a time capsule that depicts the cycle of a 24-hour period; each metre represents 45 minutes of elapsed time. It consists of a continuous panorama and eight tondos, a form that recurs frequently in his oeuvre. These round paintings serve as lenses on the Earth: from frog's- to bird's-eye view, from mirror to utopia, and from a historical perspective to a tondo with the Berlage Lyceum as the centre of the world. In his ‘crystal ball’, an idealistic vision of our planet, Den Otter even incorporated the visions of the future of no fewer than 150 students. 

Method and oeuvre of Den Otter

Olphaert den Otter, born in the village of Poortugaal in 1955, studied at the Willem de Kooning Academy from 1976 to 1981. He works as a painter in a style that is regularly characterised as neorealistic. Den Otter makes his own paint with egg tempera, the ancient precursor of oil paint. Despite the generally dull effects of this, Den Otter succeeds in creating bright and realistic images on paper or panel, partly with the help of mineral pigments. In this way, he gives a contemporary twist to a medieval technique. 

Den Otter often paints in large series that are regularly exhibited in various museums. For example, his Refuge Morphology series, consisting of 127 works, was on display in 2008 at Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, which also bought his Tondo Mondo in 2016: a sharp representation of our planet with an eye for detail. The Centraal Museum in Utrecht acquired a selection from his World Stress Painting series, in which Den Otter shows the impact of catastrophes caused by both humans and nature. This theme, by the way, runs like a thread through his entire oeuvre: the (indirect) relationship of humans to the earth. In addition to egg tempera paintings on canvas or paper, he occasionally makes site-specific wall drawings in pastel, capturing the creative process as animation. 

Donation of study material  

Olphaert den Otter donated all the study material for Een onvergetelijke dag to the RKD: a digital archive full of photos, a sketchbook, many notes, transparencies and a folder with contributions from pupils. The models for the tondos in egg tempera on canvas are also in the archive. The scale, the specific location and the active contribution of pupils to the project are exceptional. Researchers can use this donation to gain in-depth insights into the technique and working process of a contemporary painter, from preparation to realisation. The material is thus a valuable addition to the 2.5 kilometres of archive material on artists that the RKD manages.