Milah van Zuilen at the Museum Kasteel Wijlre
Solo exhibition 10 leaves & garden route
3 May, 2022 until 19 June, 2022 | garden route part of the sculpture garden permanently
10 Leaves, Kasteel Wijlre, Milah van Zuilen | Installation View
In the garden route ’10 leaves’, Milah van Zuilen (1998) gives the visitor a new perspective on the Castle Garden and its historical trees. Van Zuilen’s garden route, consisting of 10 small bronze sculptures, is going to be part of the museum’s sculpture garden permanently and will be open for visitors over the summer 2022.
Apart from this route, Milah van Zuilen presented the results of her artistic research and fieldwork at the estate in the Coach House. Here she also shows work that she made during the pandemic in her studio in the forests of the Czech Republic. ‘10 Leaves’ is her first solo museum exhibition in the Netherlands.
10 Leaves, Kasteel Wijlre, Milah van Zuilen | Bronze sculpture from the permanent collection sculpture garden
Every year, Kasteel Wile estate invites a visual artist, botanist, historian, or philosopher to develop a new walking route through our garden. Each route tells its own story about the location. ’10 leaves’ is the first route with a physical and permanent presence in the garden. Nature and the square are central to Milah van Zuilen’s work. Her practice combines art and ecological fieldwork. She is intrigued by the contrast between nature’s complexity and the human urge to order and classify. According to the artist, square patterns characterise this human perspective on the landscape.
The ’10 leaves’ garden route follows a square outline. Milah found ten leaves, picked them up, and then placed them back as bronze sculptures. In this process, the leaves also transform into a square. The geometric contour of the ’10 leaves’ garden route refers to the architecture of the castle park and responds to the estate’s spatial configuration and geometric cohesion. Visitors are invited to seek out the ten bronze leaves and then, looking around the estate with an inquisitive eye, identify the historical trees from which the leaves originally derive.
Kasteel Wijlre is an estate for culture and landscape. The estate combines contemporary art and architecture with cultural heritage and nature and intertwines five centuries; the seventeenth-century castle, the eighteenth-century Coach House, the nineteenth-century design of the castle gardens, the permanent works in the twentieth-century park, and the Hedge House art pavilion and the contemporary art exhibitions in the twenty-first century.
Kasteel Wijlre estate is located in the Zuid-Limburg hills.
Kasteel Wijlre
Kerkpad 1
6321 PX Wijlre
Wednesday – Sunday: 11 am – 5 pm