Exhibition

Recently, on March 25th of this year, guitarist and composer Reinier Baas was awarded the Boy Edgarprijs 2025 during a jubilant evening here at the BIMHUIS. For us, this was a welcome excuse to showcase the work of illustrator and visual artist Typex in our café.

Typex and Reinier Baas first met in the unlikely setting of a lunch hosted by King Willem-Alexander and Queen Máxima at Noordeinde Palace. That afternoon turned out to be the starting point of a years-long friendship and artistic collaboration. Shortly after their meeting, ‘Reinier Baas vs. Princess Discombobulatrix, a mostly instrumental opera’ followed, a composition and concert series whose libretto took shape as a graphic novel. The project is a great example of the collaboration between the two: the different art forms fully embrace each other. Not illustration in service of music, nor music playing second fiddle to visual art, but a genuine conversation between image and sound.

Typex has been illustrating since the nineties for outlets including de Volkskrant, NRC, OOR and the VPRO Gids. For his graphic novel Rembrandt, created to mark the reopening of the Rijksmuseum, he received the Willy Vandersteenprijs. Andy, a 564-page portrait of Andy Warhol, was published in six languages. Je Moeder! (Your Mom!), his first autobiographical work about his mother and family during the pandemic, was previously serialized weekly in de Volkskrant.

The four large works you see here in our café exist outside of those books and collaborations. For these independent works he used charcoal, a medium that gives him the freedom to spread out: larger in scale and dreamier in atmosphere. Together they illuminate the side of Typex that approaches his craft with an open mind and a boldness in searching for new ways to tell stories.