Negen (Nine) Witte de With organized the group exhibition
Negen (
Nine) in 1991 to present the qualities of contemporary art in the Netherlands at the time.
Chris Dercon and Gosse Oosterhof who curated the exhibition, stated that there was little in Dutch art to get excited about. The artworks in the show were exceptions and transcended “such vague notions as regionalism and nationalism.” After its debut in Rotterdam the exhibition travelled to three other venues in Europe: the Museo d’Arte Contemporanea Luigi Pecci in
Prato, the Kunstverein in
Düsseldorf and the Provinciaal Museum in
Hasselt. According to
Lynne Cooke most participating artists were involved in continuing a longstanding tradition centering in on seventeenth-century Dutch art. The art historian referenced
The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century by
Svetlana Alpers. Among other artworks
Forma Lucis III (1986),
Forma Lucis IX (1989) and
Untitled (So That I Can Build For Him A House no. 4) (1990) by Roos Theuws were part of the exhibition. Lynne Cooke claimed the visual inspection, empirical curiosity and the objective scrutiny of the eye explored in the artworks were “directed to ends that bypass symbol and allegory, leaving apprehension in the realm of sensation, of the seen.” Curator Jan van Adrichem claimed that the installations by Roos Theuws expressed the artist's interest in the visual properties of light.
IMAGO, fin de siècle in Dutch art Forma Lucis VI (1989) by Roos Theuws was part of the exhibition
IMAGO. It was a traveling exhibition, financed by the Rijksdienst Beeldende Kunst (The Netherlands Office for Fine Arts), about contemporary art and technology. For the exhibition, René Coelho brought together the work of 14 Dutch artists who all believed that the creative potential of contemporary technology should be explored. At the end of the twentieth century artists wanted to show that the "efficient, dominating and massifying products of electronics" could be used for more beautiful and imaginative purposes. These artworks were shown in venues in Switzerland, Japan, Slovakia, Hungary, Portugal, Spain and Taiwan. The catalogue of the exhibition contains a dialogue between sociologist and media researcher
Volker Grassmuck and economist and philosopher Asada Akira. The latter argues that contemporary media art consisted of a critical analysis of the system of representation. According to Asada Akirta the relationship between contemporary art and technology was similar to the relationship in the seventeenth century between the artworks by Vermeer and the research by Christiaan Huyghens and Van Leeuwenhoek who laid the foundation for optics. == Collaborations ==