ILLUSTRATIONS
Pages from the catalog
Tulip [Spring] Congress,
Station Kropswolde, Foxhol, Groningen, Netherlands, 1993 (Ed. by Magda Lagerwerf)
Original Artwork
Tulip [Spring] Congress,
Station Kropswolde, Foxhol, Groningen, Netherlands, 1993 (Ed. by Magda Lagerwerf)
Original Artwork
The Tulip [Spring] Congress was a Mail Art event held on 1 April 1993 at the Galerie Halte Kropswolde — a legendary artist-run gallery established in 1989 inside a former Dutch Railways (NS) station building in Foxhol, near Groningen, the Netherlands. The gallery was co-founded and led by sculptor and visual artist Magda Lagerwerf (born Sellingen, 1946), and it served throughout the late 1980s and 1990s as one of the most active nodes of the international Mail Art network in the Netherlands. The Vereniging Beeldende Kunstenaars Station Kropswolde (BKSK) — the Artists' Association of Station Kropswolde — was the institutional body behind the venue.
The conceptual premise of the event was both playful and politically resonant: participants from across Europe and beyond were invited to send or bring artificial tulips to be planted in a communal garden at Station Kropswolde on 1 April (April Fool's Day), a date that was itself part of the artistic gesture. The tulip, as a quintessential Dutch national symbol with a rich history of economic mythology (the 17th-century "tulipmania"), served here as a readymade charged with cultural irony. Contributors were asked to document their submissions — tulips rendered in paint on cotton, postcard drawing and collage, rubber stamp, candy, glass, zinc, wood, and various other materials — demonstrating the Mail Art network's characteristic embrace of everyday objects transformed into art.
Participants came from Finland, Poland, Italy, England, Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Argentina. The documentation — particularly the List of Participants — attests to the genuinely international scope of this small, intimate event.
The conceptual premise of the event was both playful and politically resonant: participants from across Europe and beyond were invited to send or bring artificial tulips to be planted in a communal garden at Station Kropswolde on 1 April (April Fool's Day), a date that was itself part of the artistic gesture. The tulip, as a quintessential Dutch national symbol with a rich history of economic mythology (the 17th-century "tulipmania"), served here as a readymade charged with cultural irony. Contributors were asked to document their submissions — tulips rendered in paint on cotton, postcard drawing and collage, rubber stamp, candy, glass, zinc, wood, and various other materials — demonstrating the Mail Art network's characteristic embrace of everyday objects transformed into art.
Participants came from Finland, Poland, Italy, England, Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Argentina. The documentation — particularly the List of Participants — attests to the genuinely international scope of this small, intimate event.
