Greetings from the Nieuwmarkt | 21 February 2023

It has taken a while, but the art work ensemble in the underground metro station at Nieuwmarkt, Amsterdam, is now complete again and fully restored at last.

In 1980, Louis van Gasteren together with Jan Sierhuis, Bert Griepink, Roel van den Ende and Tine Hofman created the ‘Gesamtkunstwerk’ for the Nieuwmarkt underground station, as part of a chain of station artworks along the Amsterdam East Line.

The photo collages of ‘Greetings from the Nieuwmarkt’ are back on the wall after an absence of more than ten years. The triptychs with broken mirrors were recently cleaned.
The faded photos and posters in the compositions of wall fragments at the entrance to the platform have been replaced. The slogan ‘We’ll Keep Living Here’ (‘Wij Blijven Hier Wonen’), painted anew with white gloss, is still wet and stands out against the wall as never before.

The underground mission is done!

Martijn Sandberg

Read the pamphlet ‘Demolition Ball and Battle of Waterloo’ here that I wrote in 2011 promoting the conservation and renovation of the artworks during structural alterations to the East Line metro stations.

Related articles, section ‘blog’:

‘Demolition Ball and Battle of Waterloo‘, 29 June 2011
‘Artworks metro stations‘, early documents, 5 August 2011
‘Favourite Sites in Amsterdam‘, 3 February 2018
‘Through The Lens of Louis van Gasteren‘, 1 March 2018
‘Inventory Post-War Wall Art Amsterdam‘, 6 December 2018

Click here to see text in Dutch, as PDF.