The inimitable Maarten Baas helps launch an artist-in-residence program

Holland's oldest department store, de Bijenkorf, recently partnered with Amsterdam's Rijksmuseum to launch Room on the Roof, a new artist-in-residence series hosted in a small tower atop de Bijenkorf's flagship Amsterdam store. The pair has invited an international roster of artists to work from the lofty studio on projects ranging from dance, poetry, and film to photography and design, and the resulting works will be shared in store and online. To start things off, the program has cleverly tapped the inimitable Maarten Baas as its debut resident.

Maarten Baas at work in the tower

Inspired by the view from the historic tower, Baas has chosen to focus his efforts on a Sisyphean task centered around one of his favorite themes: time. As Baas explains, with My Latest Work, "I personally perform as an artist who has given himself the hopeless task of copying a clock in real time. The clock is the one on the Beurs van Berlage, which can be seen from the Room On The Roof. Every time I finish a drawing, the time shown on the clock has caught up with the drawing. A performance can be seen in the display window entailing a person continually hanging up my latest work and then destroying it a minute later. A new drawing of the clock showing the current time is repeatedly hung in the window.” Baas's merrily chaotic project will be on display in the shop's corner windows on Dam Square through February 8th. 

View of the tower

Inside the tower, Baas's

inside the Room on the Roof

inside the Room on the Roof

Maarten Baas prepares his presentation

Maarten Baas inside the de Bijenkorf window on Dam Square

 *All images courtesy of de Bijenkorf