For over forty years, Pieter and Marieke Sanders avidly collected the work of relatively young, as well as more renowned artists from the Netherlands and overseas. Their collection includes paintings, works on paper, sculptures, installations, photography, videos, and artists’ books. The emphasis lies on innovative and conceptual work. In recent years, they have been following in particular new developments in the field of new media, video art and post-internet art.
In 2019, Marieke Sanders and her children Albertine Zoetmulder and Pieter Sanders jr. announced their intention to place a selection from the collection of contemporary art that she and her husband Pieter Sanders (1938 - 2018) collected with five Dutch art museums. After a period of intensive orientation and selection, no fewer than 225 works were divided between Centraal Museum Utrecht, Kunstmuseum Den Haag, Rijksmuseum Amsterdam, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam and Teylers Museum Haarlem. On the occasion of this transfer, these five museums presented the joint exhibition Collector's Item, in which the collection was shown one more time as a whole. This exhibition was on show at Centraal Museum Utrecht from 14 November 2020 to 7 March 2021.
In 2024, Marieke Sanders once again donated a large number of works by Finnish photographers from the collection to Museum de Fundatie in Zwolle. These works, complemented by other works from the collection and works from the museum itself, will be on show from June 8, 2024 in the exhibition Northern Light: nature photography, curated by Maarten Bertheux. The exhibition can be seen until 22 September 2024.
