The combination chess and art has a history of many centuries. No other sport, even not football, did inspire so many artists. Lots of centuries ago already, there were made drawings, paintings, … sculptures and chess-sets and always and everywhere in numerous professional and fancier artists did represent the chess-play in a creative way.
Also present-day artists keep managing to make something actual of this very old theme.
In the summer of 2005, Margreet Wevers and Geert van Tongeren (both coming from and living in The Netherlands) got the idea to do something with the combination of chess and art. They called this project and the company: Schaakkunst (schaak=chess and kunst=art). Schaakkunst made contact with several artists who use the theme chess in their work. In August of 2005 they started the website www.schaakkunst.nl. In the beginning with only two artists and their own work. Margreet Wevers did design some puffs and a few other products. She is also the designer and maker of the website and designer of calendars, chess notation booklets, etc. Naturally bases on the chess theme. Geert van Tongeren made several mosaic mirrors and he designed a radiant chess-table.
Schaakkunst organized her first exhibition in April of 2006. After that there was a fast progress. Meanwhile they are often present at chess-tournaments with few or many works of chess-art. Organizations of tournaments are very pleased with this, because players and visitors can see more than only the combat at the chessboard. For example: Schaakkunst was present in Hilversum during the Dutch Championship Chess and they were present at the Corus Chess Tournament in January of 2007.
Schaakkunst was also asked to organize a comprehensive exhibition for a paper in Limburg. This paper wrote: “This is the most beautiful and largest chess-art exhibition of Western Europe!”.
In the meantime about 10 more artists did join this original initiative.
With the new artists and their chess-art, www.schaakkunst.nl became a large site with many various art-works. Most of the work shown is for sale. Further there is an online shop with smaller articles, like calendars, artprints, chess-art-wine, etc. All nice things to get or give as a present. In the close future several chess-sets will be added.
A short while ago, one can find Schaakkunst at www.chess-art.eu.
The next comprehensive exhibition of Schaakkunst will take place during March and April 2007. The location is in Druten (a small village nearby Nijmegen in the Netherlands). At this exhibition many works displayed at the website will be exposed. One can not only admire paintings and sculptures, but also beautiful chess-sets.
Beautiful stuff!