Last week marked the graduation exhibitions of the art academies of Amsterdam and The Hague, and since I had the Wednesday off, I grabbed my camera and raced through the labyrinth that is the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague in two short hours.

My time there was way too short to form any solid impressions—I saw maybe a quarter of all the works on display. I dare say that there seemed to be minor themes running through the exhibition. A lot of works were displayed in relative darkness. The psychological phenomenon of hoarding came up a couple of times. The bedroom from hell was also something that seemed to have inspired a number of students.

Art blogger Niek Hendrix noticed something else:

Certain fashionable trends are copied almost verbatim. […] The boundaries between Instagram photos and well thought-out art works is getting thinner and in some cases, you can already speak of proper kitsch. KABK looks like Rietveld in that its artists will seamlessly find a spot in the commercial circuit.

Apart from Niek Hendrix the bloggers of Mr Motley and Trendbeheer have also visited the nation’s art academies to return with bushels of words and armfuls of photos.

My photo report can be found on our Flickr page.

(Photos from top to bottom depicting works by Daniel Dmyszewicz, Mateusz Tkaczeń, Azra Sudetic, and Olivier Turpin)