The Rembrandt House Museum in Amsterdam is hosting a working tattoo studio on its premises through November 7th. “The Poor Man's Rembrandt Project,” a collaboration with tattoo artist Henk Schiffmacher and his studio Schiffmacher & Veldhoen, returns for a second run following its debut in 2023. From October 26th through November 7th, visitors can book a tattoo based on Rembrandt van Rijn’s etchings and drawings, with prices ranging from €100 to €350 ($110 to $390) and a €50 deposit ($56) required at booking. Some walk-in slots are reserved each day.
“Worldwide, more tattoos are sold than works of art to hang on your wall,” Schiffmacher said in a statement. “An old tattoo artist once called tattoos ‘the poor man's Rembrandt’: a work of art that is more affordable than a painting by one of the old masters, but no less carefully executed and selected…For us, it is an incredible honor to work in the place where Rembrandt's soul can still be felt, and to work with his etchings and drawings. Grand and small art coming together.”
The museum frames the project as a dialogue between two printmaking traditions. Both etchings and tattoos begin as a drawing before being transferred with ink and needle, in Rembrandt's case onto a copper plate and sheet of paper, and in the tattoo artists’ case onto skin. Schiffmacher’s team is setting up in the museum’s modern wing, on the Jodenbreestraat site where Rembrandt and his own assistants and pupils once worked collaboratively on their art. “This is all about content,” museum director Milou Halbesma told the Art Newspaper. “We are a museum of craftsmanship, and we are trying to throw open the craft of Rembrandt and his students as widely as possible. If you translate that to today, we have a number of world-famous Amsterdam creators… And this is a chance to get a tattoo from one of these masters.”
The museum also organized the giveaway of a free, full Rembrandt–based back piece, executed by a team of artists from Schiffmacher & Veldhoen in Amsterdam and St. Catharina in Antwerp. The winner, Bo Kwakernaak, a 28-year-old from Amersfoort, volunteered his back after Schiffmacher's studio put out a call on Instagram. The team of tattoo artists has spent over 20 hours in sessions, recreating Rembrandt's The Descent from the Cross (1633) across his back.
The final session takes place at the museum during Museumnacht on November 7th. “I have always felt a connection with Rembrandt paintings,” Kwakernaak told the Art Newspaper. “I'm not religious, but I've always been drawn to religious imagery. Here, it is the emotion in the faces, the feeling of grief. There is a whole story in one image.”
Schiffmacher says he sees the tattoo as echoing Rembrandt’s time as well. “There were so many different people in Amsterdam at the time; there would have been tattooed sailors." The finished tattoo needs roughly a year for its pigment to settle into the skin.
The resident tattoo team for the two-week studio includes Schiffmacher, longtime partner Tycho Veldhoen, Morrison Cheyenne Schiffmacher, Rupa van Teylingen, Antwerp-based Frederik Moens, and Swedish artist Olof Arrevik.
from Artsy News https://ift.tt/KIUG7WD
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