The Ambassadors Circle

Working with vivid colors, Faria van Creij-Callender creates a magical-realist world in which identity, family history, and cultural layering come together. Her interiors and garden scenes are populated by female figures who seem simultaneously present and lost in thought. Through her play with windows, mirrors, and paintings within the painting, she explores the canvas as a window – onto memory, desire, and imagination.

Faria’s work has recently been recognized with several prestigious art prizes, including the Royal Award for Painting (2024) and the De Scheffer Art Prize (2026, awarded at the Dordrechts Museum).

Gilleam Trapenberg’s photographic work explores the complex identity of Curaçao and the Caribbean, looking beyond tourist clichés to address themes of colonial legacy, identity, and the tension between home and elsewhere. Antoinette Nausikaä works across photography, drawing, text, clay, and installation, exploring the relationship between people, nature, and our immediate surroundings. Her work invites us to slow down and look at the world around us from a different perspective. We’ll also meet Arnout Killian, who combines his painting practice with sound installations. His paintings often depict everyday spaces and scenes, while his sound works explore how sound moves through a space and can shape the way we experience it. Finally, we’ll visit Lily Lanfermeijer, whose practice moves between sculpture, space, and a range of materials. She explores how forms and ideas can take on new meanings when translated from one material into another.

PAN Amsterdam is the leading fair for art, antiques and design. Every year, more than 45,000 visitors are inspired by the thousands of works and objects presented at the fair. From classical antiquity and Old Masters to photography, contemporary art, antiques, design furniture and unique objects. Every piece is examined in advance by independent experts for quality, authenticity and condition.

In one hour, you’ll get an accessible introduction to the fair’s wide-ranging offer, with plenty of room to ask all the questions you’ve always wanted to ask about buying art at a fair. Afterwards, you can explore PAN Amsterdam at your own pace. This year, more than 125 galleries, antique dealers and art traders will present over 5,000 years of art history at the RAI.

Interest in self-taught and non-formally trained artists is growing across the international art world. But how do we assess the work of an artist who has developed outside the established art circuit, where the usual measures of success may not apply? What determines the value of a work? Its quality, its story, its context, its reputation, or ultimately the market?

And how do art professionals and collectors discover artists who work beyond the beaten path? At the same time, when these artists enter the established art world, new questions arise. Do they actually want to become part of it, and does their practice fit within its existing structures? Together with fair director Manuela Klerkx, we will explore these questions and consider what happens when artists challenge the boundaries of the art world. Afterwards, there will be plenty of time to explore the fair at your own pace.

During our visit you will learn more about the stories behind the artworks on view and gain insight into their market position. Art Antwerp offers an engaging selection of established and up-and-coming artists: 78 galleries from 9 countries present highlights from their programmes. The selection is carefully curated and by invitation only. After our tour you can spend the afternoon exploring the fair at your own pace.

Photo: David Plas

Rembrandt’s home was a creative hub. Rembrandt did not work here alone: many pupils and assistants were making art here too. Now, almost 400 years later, a new generation of artists is creating new work in the Rembrandt House Museum during Rembrandt Open Studio.  During our visit two contemporary artists are working in this space: Marije Gertenbach and Shani Leseman.

Marije Gertenbach (Netherlands, 1990) creates paintings and prints that appear abstract yet always contain something recognisable. Amidst large planes of colour, you can just make out the shape of a body. She explores the role the female body occupies in space, in history, and in relation to others. She prefers to work on jute, observing with curiosity the exchange between paint and the surface.

Shani Leseman (Curaçao, 1996) likes being surprised during the creative process. Her artworks emerge from a dialogue between her ideas, the material, and chance. All the while also leaving room for influences from the subconscious. Her work is often about dreams, the magic of everyday life, and the meaning inherent in objects. She mixes earth pigments into paint herself, which she then applies to cotton canvases or glass sheets.

We will start our visit with a coffee and croissant at the museum. After visiting the studio, where Leseman and Gertenbach have set up their temporary workspace, you will have the opportunity to explore the rest of the museum at your own pace.