Courtesy of the Rijksmuseum
Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum has opened Rijks Studio, an online presentation of 125,000 works in its collection, to enable members of the public to create their own artworks. The ultra high-resolution images of both famous and less well-known works can be downloaded, zoomed in on, shared, and manipulated copyright-free, enabling users to have prints made of entire works of art or details from them, or to use them in practical applications such as “material to upholster furniture or wallpaper, or to decorate a car or an iPad cover”. The Rijksmuseum is asking leading international artists, designers and architects to become pioneers of Rijks Studio by selecting one work from the collection and using it creatively to create a new artwork. These will be released in the months leading up to the reopening of the museum in Aprl 2013. The first to be unveiled is a tattoo inspired by a seventeenth century flower painting in the collection. Taco Dibbits, Director of Collections, said: “We created Rijks Studio based on the belief that the collection of the Rijksmuseum belongs to us all… we want to unleash the artist in everyone.”