Current exhibition
Ingeborg Meulendijks: Het Geheime Huis at Odapark, Venray (The Netherlands)
September 28, 2025 – January 4, 2026
Odapark occupies a unique position in the (art) landscape, as a place where art and nature exist in close proximity. Visitors can stroll through exhibitions and wander among trees and sand drifts in tranquillity.
Since 1997, Ingeborg Meulendijks has been working on The Secret House, an ongoing art project consisting of sculptural models, monumental photographs of modelled spaces and work on paper. By playing with scale, perspective and light, she explores how we experience spaces on an emotional and intimate level. In Odapark, we are showing part of her collection of miniature rooms, in which her thoughts on dwelling and being are visualised.
Ingeborg designs and builds these rooms in her studio, located in part of the 19th-century monastery of Steyl. Here, she meticulously saws and sands scale models made of wood, cardboard and textiles. She captures the atmosphere of these spaces with an analogue camera and develops the images herself in a darkroom. She consciously chooses this slow way of working in which, like the monks and nuns in Steyl, she does everything by hand. It is precisely this slowing down that makes the creative process a liberation from the time pressure and haste that often dominate our daily lives.
Ingeborg Meulendijks puts it this way: 'To live in dignity, everyone needs a home. A place where you really want to be. But do our experiences of time and place correspond to the concept of “home” as an architectural space? In the secret house, the scale model stands on the threshold between imagination and reality, inviting us to think in both directions. It is the space in my head and outside my head. It is a game between doing and thinking, between big and small. Blaise Pascal1 put it very beautifully: “Small things do as though they were big, and big things do as though they were small.”
1French mathematician, physicist and philosopher (1623-1662)
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For the exhibition, filmmaker Charlotte Lagro has created a short film that focuses on Ingeborg Meulendijks' working process in her workplace, the monastery and monastery garden in Steyl.
An interaction between the artist and her environment, between simplicity and complexity, tranquillity and craftsmanship, nature and architecture.
Lagro beautifully captured the atmosphere in all its facets and created a choreography of objects and natural sounds. An honest documentation of Meulendijks’ work in progress, which is connected to light and darkness.
Click here to watch the film.
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For the exhibition, designer Rick van der Linden has created a booklet containing photographs and essays (in Dutch and English).
Click here to view the booklet.
Curation exhibition: Ingeborg Meulendijks, Joep Vossebeld
Organisation: Hester van Tongerlo
Production: Bas de Weerd, Luc Knapen
Graphic design: Rick van der Linden
Film: Charlotte Lagro
Scenography: Ingeborg Meulendijks, Linda Robben
Photography exhibition: Nikolas Fahlbusch, Frank Brouwers, Perry van Duijnhoven
Made possible by: Mondriaan Fonds, Provincie Limburg, Gemeente Venray