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For the Cannes Film Festival Studio Sabine Marcelis designed a spatial composition that served as a meeting place for the international film industry. A variation on the installation is on show from 19 October 2017 in Gallery 3. Het Nieuwe Instituut's Tamar Shafrir reflects on this work in the context of 100 years of De Stijl.

In 1917 Theo van Doesburg published the first edition of De Stijl, a magazine that would launch an art movement that would become one of the most significant cultural legacies of the Netherlands in the modern era. De Stijl was characterised by simple planes and geometric forms, clear primary colours, and graphic qualities of outline and pattern in a variety of scales, from magazines to architecture. In particular, the paintings by the artist Piet Mondrian in red, blue, and yellow, bounded by black lines and white space, defined what De Stijl meant for an international audience.

100 years later, the declaration of De Stijl by the Dutch vanguard has been celebrated around the world through a series of exhibitions, installations, and reflections in various institutions of modern and contemporary art as well as public spaces. Het Nieuwe Instituut, keeper of an extensive De Stijl archive, initiated the exhibition Architecture and Interiors: The Desire for Style, in collaboration with the Gemeentemuseum in The Hague. Het Nieuwe Instituut's archive also supported exhibitions at Kunsthal KAdE on colour in De Stijl and in Utrecht's Centraal Museum on the legacy of Gerrit Rietveld. Meanwhile, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam chose to look at the movement's continuing influence on artists throughout the 20th century, including such idiosyncratic practitioners as the Dutch artist Bas Jan Ader and the German artist Isa Genzken. The facade of The Hague's town hall became the canvas for a gargantuan replica of Mondrian's visual scheme, stretched to the scale of architecture, while in a much smaller format, PostNL released a centennial De Stijl stamp in partnership with Het Nieuwe Instituut and the Gemeentemuseum in The Hague.

Why is De Stijl still important today for such diverse cultural fields as art, design, architecture and digital media, which have each developed or founded their own cultures, economies, traditions, jargons and canons in the intervening century? One of the most powerful lessons we may take from De Stijl is its rejection of the distinctions between these disciplines. The founders of De Stijl believed that a common ethos and understanding of the moment as a decisive fulcrum -- politically, technologically, and socially -- could guide all forms of material and visual culture, from advertising to urbanism. In particular, the idea of art as something separate from the surface of everyday life was broken down. As Van Doesburg wrote in his 1926 manifesto "The End of Art", "Let's refresh ourselves with things that are not Art: the bathroom, the W.C., the bathtub, the telescope, the bicycle, the automobile, the subways, the flat-iron&Art, whose function nobody knows, hinders the function of life. For the sake of progress we must destroy Art." On the other hand, the Austrian artist Raoul Hausmann's 1918 text "Synthetic Cinema of Painting" showed the voracity of artists for new technologies, especially film.

An interdisciplinary understanding of fine arts, popular culture and multivalent design practices is reflected in this installation and the process of its creation. In 2017 EYE International and the Netherlands Film Fund collaborated with Het Nieuwe Instituut to create a Dutch Pavilion inspired by De Stijl at the Cannes Film Festival. The designer Sabine Marcelis (born in the Netherlands, raised in New Zealand, and now based in Rotterdam) was chosen for the commission based on her extensive investigation of colour, light, geometry and space since her studio's foundation in 2011. Here, she has reinterpreted Mondrian's iconic painting _Composition in Red, Blue and Yellow _(1930) as a three-dimensional experience. In this space, black lines become thin structural elements, and rectangles of colour are extruded into volumetric forms. As in Mondrian's paintings, the black lines structure the empty white space with a unique rhythm, while the red, blue and yellow fields highlight points of focus to invest the space with meaning.

Yet Marcelis' installation also reveals many evolutions in architecture, design and film that have taken place in the last century. Her coloured prisms appear solid when seen from the front, but break down into transparent planes with gradients of colour when viewed from different angles. Marcelis' work shows the significance of craft and material experimentation in contemporary design. At the same time, the collaboration with EYE International and the Netherlands Film Fund points to the renewed relevance of design for a screen-mediated culture. Marcelis revives the avant-garde spirit of De Stijl by dissolving the barriers between the creative fields of design, architecture, film, art and experience, and proves that deep collaboration between these disciplines is the path to visual, technological and cultural innovation in the present day.

Spatial Composition in Red, Blue and Yellow_ by Sabine Marcelis was commissioned by Het Nieuwe Instituut in collaboration with EYE International and the Netherlands Film Fund. It was first presented at the Dutch Pavilion in the 2017 Cannes Film Festival, where it was awarded the Special Jury Prize._