Exhibitions to see during Tefaf Maastricht 2025

Wael Shawky, Drama 1882

Bonnefanten Museum, Maastricht, until 30 March

The Egyptian artist Wael Shawky marshalled a cast and crew of 400 people at an open-air theatre in his native Alexandria to film Drama 1882 (2024), an extraordinary musical rendition of the Urabi Revolt, a 19th-century military uprising against Anglo-French imperial influence that took place in the city. An Egyptian colonel of peasant origins, Ahmed Urabi, led a revolt against the ruling viceroy that was ultimately crushed by British forces, ushering in the occupation of Egypt until 1956. “Whether Urabi is a hero or traitor depends on who wrote this history,” Shawky told The Art Newspaper last year. “I was interested to work with performers and think of history as theatre.”

The “drama” of the film’s title holds a double meaning for the artist, encompassing both its performative nature—as a musical composed and written by Shawky himself in Arabic—and what he calls “the sense of catastrophe and our inherent doubt in history”. Following the film’s premiere at the Egyptian pavilion of the 2024 Venice Biennale, the Bonnefanten Maastricht, Centraal Museum Utrecht and Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam have jointly acquired Drama 1882 as an “urgent and timeless” addition to the Dutch national collections. Its first presentation in the Netherlands runs in Maastricht until the end
of March.

Andy Warhol, Vanitas

Schunck, Heerlen, until 16 March

For all his fascination with celebrity icons and the trappings of consumer culture, from the Brillo box to Campbell’s soup cans, Andy Warhol also had an introspective, spiritual side. Born in Pittsburgh into a devout Byzantine Catholic family, he attended weekly mass with his mother and his faith deepened after he survived an assassination attempt in 1968. Schunck’s exhibition, organised in collaboration with The Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, makes the case for the king of Pop as an artist preoccupied with the fragility of life.

Vanitas presents more than 100 works and archival objects that reflect Warhol’s interests in transience, spirituality and death in thematic dialogue with a selection of 17th-century Dutch vanitas engravings and paintings from the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. Warhol’s paintings and rarely seen drawings featuring skull motifs appear alongside screen prints from the Death and Disaster series, which, beginning in 1962, appropriated morbid mass-media imagery from tabloid newspapers and police archives. The artist’s familiar serial approach extended to his Time Capsules—hundreds of cardboard boxes in which he preserved the ephemera of his life. Number 20, on view in the show, mixes wigs and pink corsets with Chinese astrology charts and handwritten notes from friends.

The Worlds of Paul Delvaux

La Boverie, Liège, Belgium, until 16 March

After a fateful encounter in 1934 with the works of René Magritte and Giorgio de Chirico, the Belgian painter Paul Delvaux (1897-1994) plunged into a new Surrealist direction and never looked back. Although he distanced himself from the official Surrealist circle and the psychoanalytic ideas of Sigmund Freud, Delvaux’s uncanny twilight scenes of doll-like women, skeletons, classical architecture and modern trains bear all the hallmarks of a movement that sought to make visible the mysteries of the subconscious mind.

Organised to mark the centenary of Surrealism in 2024, La Boverie’s major retrospective unites more than 150 paintings, drawings and objects, ranging from the artist’s early academic training to the final years of his career. Yet the exhibition eschews a strict chronological layout to explore the principal influences on Delvaux’s inner world as a “game of visual ricochets”, including his deep interest in classical antiquity, a fascination with a reclining Venus waxwork in a Brussels museum and previously unexplored dialogues with other artists, such as Amedeo Modigliani and the Flemish Expressionists.