Remembering Holland (2009)

When you look at a river, what do you see? Remembering Holland by Jan Wouter van Reijen carries the viewer through the basin of the River Waal, past painters, sculptors and poets. Van Reijen follows the entire course of the river, from the German border to the North Sea, and creates portraits of various artists who have taken the riverine landscape as their theme. Each and every one of them sings the river’s praises in his or her own way, from extremely realistic to abstract. At every spot along the way, and each day anew, the river landscape changes: we see the water dark and colorful, glistening in late and early light, in morning dew and by moonlight, in clouds of mist and the snows of winter. Yet the water brings more than beauty alone. The flooding of the forelands and the reinforcement of the dykes in 1995 remind us of the eternal struggle of the Dutch against the rising water. See it and be borne along on a voyage of the imagination.