Great Exhibitions #25 — Frankenthaler / Judd: Two Paths Through Abstraction

📅 Sunday, 1 November 2026
🕒 15:00
📍 Kunsthal KAdE, Amersfoort

Two artists.

Born in the same year.

Emerging from the same post-war New York art world.

And arriving at almost opposite ideas of what abstraction could be.
For Great Exhibitions #25, we’re heading to Kunsthal KAdE in Amersfoort for Frankenthaler / Judd, an exhibition bringing together Helen Frankenthaler (1928–2011) and Donald Judd (1928–1994).

### Two very different paths

Frankenthaler approached painting through colour, movement, intuition and chance.

Her paintings often seem to expand across the canvas rather than sit on top of it: liquid colour, staining, irregular forms and spaces that can suggest landscape without ever quite becoming landscape.

Judd went almost in the opposite direction.

His work rejected expressive gesture in favour of structure, repetition, industrial materials and real physical space. Rather than asking what a painting could represent, Judd increasingly questioned why an artwork needed to be a painting — or a sculpture in the traditional sense — at all.

Put next to each other, the contrast is striking:
fluidity vs precision
gesture vs system
colour vs structure
intuition vs industrial logic

But the exhibition is also about something else.

### Who enters the canon?

Frankenthaler and Judd were both successful figures in post-war American art, but their reception in the Netherlands could hardly have been more different.

From the 1970s onwards, Judd was widely exhibited and collected by major Dutch museums. Frankenthaler, like several of the women associated with Abstract Expressionism, remained largely absent from Dutch collections for decades. KAdE uses that contrast to look not only at the artworks themselves, but also at how museums, curators, collecting policies and gender helped determine whose work became part of the canon.

And that makes this much more interesting than simply placing two famous American artists in adjacent rooms.

It becomes a show about two versions of abstraction — and two very different art-historical fortunes.

### 🍺 Afterwards: Rock City

After the exhibition, we’ll continue to Rock City Brewpub, Amersfoort’s own craft brewery.

They brew their beer on site and currently have 20+ taps, alongside a kitchen built around BBQ and food from the smoker. The brewpub is open until 20:00 on Sundays, so we can finish the afternoon there with a beer and, for anyone who wants, something to eat.

### Practical information

We meet at 15:00 in front of Kunsthal KAdE.

The museum is open until 17:00. Regular admission is currently €21, while Museumkaart holders pay a €3 supplement.

Everyone arranges their own museum admission.

Drinks and food at Rock City are optional and paid individually.

No previous knowledge of Frankenthaler, Judd, Abstract Expressionism or Minimalism required.

Just be prepared to spend an afternoon discovering how two people born in the same year, working in the same city, managed to make abstraction mean almost completely different things.