UTRECHT.- The Centraal Museum is presenting the first exhibition to examine the full breadth of Frans Franciscus’s career, bringing together more than 40 years of paintings and ceramics by one of the Netherlands’ most distinctive figurative artists.
Titled Godenschemering – Frans Franciscus—or Twilight of the Gods—the exhibition ranges from works made during the artist’s early years at art school in Utrecht to recent large-scale compositions. It also places Franciscus’s work in dialogue with paintings, photographs and objects from the museum’s own collection.
Guest curators Paul van den Akker and Claar Griffioen have organized the exhibition around themes that have repeatedly surfaced in Franciscus’s work: artistic ambition, love, power, religion, human behavior and sexual and cultural diversity.
“Frans Franciscus is one of the most distinctive Dutch figurative painters of his generation,” said Bart Rutten, artistic director of the Centraal Museum. “With humor and deep engagement, he explores themes such as power, love, faith and human behavior—subjects that are deeply rooted in the Centraal Museum’s collection.”
Figurative painting after abstraction
The exhibition’s title refers to a turning point in the art world around 1980, when the dominance of abstraction began to weaken and a younger generation of artists returned to recognizable figures and narrative imagery.
Franciscus, born in Utrecht in 1959, emerged within that changing environment. Rather than abandoning art history, he made it one of his central materials. His paintings borrow from religious imagery, old master compositions and established artistic conventions, but recast them through humor, irony and contemporary social concerns.
Over the past four decades, he has used that approach to address diversity, identity and injustice, often questioning whose bodies and experiences have traditionally been represented within Western art.
His paintings feature artists, queer figures and characters inspired by Christian saints. Works such as Visitors (1992), Olubunmi (1992) and Decoronation (2003) reveal his ability to combine theatrical imagery with sharp cultural criticism.
In Olubunmi, dozens of Maasai figures tumble through the space surrounding an abstract painter. The scene is playful and chaotic, but its humor carries a pointed critique. By inserting African figures into a setting associated with Western modernism, Franciscus challenges the assumed universality of the Western art canon and calls for a broader understanding of figurative tradition.
Old images, contemporary conflicts
The exhibition shows how Franciscus repeatedly takes familiar historical motifs and places them in new situations. The resulting scenes suggest that desire, violence, rivalry and belief may change their outward appearance, but remain recognizable across centuries.
For Godenschemering, the artist created a monumental triptych titled No Masters or Kings When the Ritual Begins (2025). The work was inspired by Hendrick ter Brugghen’s Three Backgammon Players of 1625, held in the Centraal Museum’s collection.
Rather than simply quoting the earlier painting, Franciscus uses it as the starting point for a contemporary meditation on hostility and the consequences of war. The work demonstrates how he treats art history not as a fixed inheritance, but as a living language that can be adapted to confront present-day realities.
The exhibition also includes paintings and ceramics spanning his long career, allowing visitors to trace the development of his visual language from his student years to his most recent work.
Reconstructing a lost studio and mural
One of the exhibition’s more personal sections partially reconstructs Franciscus’s studio from the period when he studied at the Utrecht art academy between 1982 and 1986.
The installation offers insight into the environment in which his early ideas developed and brings viewers closer to the working life behind the finished paintings.
The museum is also revisiting a largely forgotten chapter in its relationship with the artist. In 1993, Franciscus created a monumental mural for the same floor of the Centraal Museum where the current exhibition is being presented. The mural has since been lost.
Using sketches, photographs and archival documents, the exhibition brings that vanished work back into view. The material allows visitors to consider both the scale of the original project and the temporary nature of artworks created for specific architectural settings.
A career shaped by art history and contemporary life
Frans Franciscus is the professional name of Frans van de Vooren. Since the 1980s, he has developed a wide-ranging practice encompassing painting, drawing and ceramics.
His work has been shown internationally in New York, Berlin and China and is held in Dutch museum collections including the Drents Museum, Kunsthal Helmond, Museum Jan Cunen, the Centraal Museum, Museum Catharijneconvent and Museum Het Valkhof.
Although his paintings are rooted in historic artistic traditions, their subjects remain closely connected to contemporary debates. Questions of representation, sexuality, cultural identity and authority run throughout his work, often presented through images that initially appear humorous or theatrical.
That combination gives Franciscus’s art its particular tension. His paintings can be visually seductive and comic, yet they also ask viewers to reconsider the values and exclusions embedded in the images inherited from the past.
A richly illustrated publication accompanies the exhibition. Published by WBOOKS, Godenschemering | F. Franciscus – painter in conflict with art history was written by Van den Akker, emeritus professor of art history at the Open University, and Griffioen, a writer on visual art and literary fiction.
Godenschemering – Frans Franciscus is the seventh exhibition in De Verdieping, a Centraal Museum series in which artists, designers and collectives present their work in relation to the museum’s collection. The exhibition runs from July 10 through November 22, 2026.
