In the month before Easter, De Oranjerie in Zeijen is traditionally transformed into an Easter egg mecca for the International Egg Exhibition. This year this will happen for the 38th time with the exhibition ‘Art on Scale’.
All those times it was with organizer (and happy egg) Geeske de Vries. “Unbelievable, but I’m still holding out. I don’t want to miss it. Yesterday a lady from Amsterdam said that I really shouldn’t stop, because we are the only ones in the Netherlands who do this. The atmosphere here is also so friendly. “
The exhibition contains all kinds of special, artistic eggs. “We call these processed eggs. You can paint them, cut them, drill them, you can do all kinds of things with them. You can see all the techniques here. It is art,” says De Vries.
In the almost four decades that De Oranjerie has been organizing the exhibition, De Vries and associates have built up a large network. This has ensured that she can exhibit eggs from all over the world. “They send them to us, but we also collect them ourselves from Germany and from fairs. There are also eggs that stay here and are replenished by post. For the exhibition, the place is full of boxes, boxes and boxes of eggs,” she says.
According to De Vries, it is a barrier for many exhibitors to participate in ‘Art on Scale’. “The distance is sometimes a problem and because eggs are so fragile, sending them is a risk. Yes, I am also insured for it, that has to be the case. I don’t want to run the risk of them breaking.”
How the artists manage to work the eggs in such detail remains a mystery to De Vries: “Some eggs are very finely painted or decorated with clay. There is even embroidery on an egg or through an egg. How do they do it? ” She shrugs. “That’s the fun of it.”
The artists will move to Zeijen one by one for the duration of the exhibition. “You can view the techniques here. Every day a certain technique is demonstrated.”
In addition to chicken eggs, this year’s exhibition also features the largest egg artwork in the world. It concerns an egg from an elephant bird, a now extinct flightless bird that roamed around Madagascar until about the year 1000. The egg is about forty centimeters in size and has a diameter of thirty centimeters.
“It’s a real egg,” says De Vries. “The egg was divided into fragments and all shell parts were found on the beaches of Madagascar. These shards were collected together and eventually a complete egg was made from them. There are forty eggs in the world. There is still one whole egg in Naturalis in Leiden. egg to see.”
“There really are thousands of eggs here,” De Vries concludes, as proud as a peacock.
The collection can be viewed in De Oranjerie every day, except Mondays, from 10 a.m. to 5:30 p.m.