Wim T. Schippers (1942–2026) Sublime Disrupter

Where the world draws rigid lines between high art and low entertainment, Schippers ignored that divide for over sixty years with an utterly self-evident logic. His practice rests on the foundation that everything—and absolutely everything—is meaningless, and that this meaninglessness offers the ultimate freedom to create.

That he was granted a legendary exhibition at Museum Fodor—at the time the annex of the Stedelijk Museum under the leadership of Willem Sandberg—as a very young maker is art history. But when I look at our collaboration, it was not just his early work that drew me.

The First Meeting: Hasselt 2009
I got to know Wim personally as an artist in 2009, during his participation in the Hasselt Triennial. I remember him there in absolute top form. He stood in the midst of a group of people, talking non-stop; Wim was incredibly good at driving a conversation without you even realizing it, or at consistently answering a question with counter-questions. There was simply no getting a word in edgewise.

The idea to actually do something together didn’t come until years later. His early period, during which his first visual art emerged, appealed to me enormously. But I must confess that my interest in Wim also stemmed from somewhere else: radio and television.

As a four- or five-year-old, I had already heard his voice in the iconic duo he formed with Paul Haenen as Bert and Ernie on Sesamstraat (Sesame Street). Later, as a schoolboy on Wednesday afternoons, I would ride straight home to turn on the radio and listen to Ronflonflon avec Jacques Plafond, which aired weekly from 1984 to 1991. It was during one of those broadcasts that Schippers deliberately misadjusted the frequency at the Hilversum studio, with the result that the entire broadcast was unintelligible throughout the Netherlands for an hour. It was the absolute pinnacle of his urge to disrupt.

The Studio
As is often the case when you sense that something is extraordinarily interesting, you only know what shape it can take once you get to know an artist personally. I myself was born in 1972. The exhibition at Fodor already took place in 1963. At such a moment, the thought sometimes creeps up on you: who am I?

But what did I find when I paid my very first visit to his studio in Amsterdam? The space was full. A chaos just as an artist’s studio should be: a workshop where dozens of works were in development at the same time. Wim apologized profusely for the mess, but meanwhile, works from the 1960s stood alongside new ones. It was these works that we later showed at TEFAF, in a memorable booth featuring as many as twenty sculptures together.

This way of working together gave Wim a tremendous sense of space, and me too. It was a mutual trust that generated an incredible energy. I still remember stepping into his studio one day and he had built a tower with moving parts, motors, a propeller, and shreds of fabric.

Essential
Perhaps the very finest moments for me were when we stood at TEFAF. Sometimes the work we were about to show wasn’t quite finished yet. Then Wim would ask how much time we had left, and if he could perhaps continue working in my booth for a bit. I would allow it, sometimes long after closing time, just to let him work happily. It was something natural, something that really only Wim could do. It didn’t detract from the other works we showed; it just belonged. It was perhaps an essential part of our collaboration.

He was unimaginably stubborn, and precisely because of that, truly great. In the visual arts, and certainly in Wim’s universe, it is also constantly about the laws of failure. About taking the hits, picking up the pieces, and moving on. A striking example of this is the time Wim received an invitation from the Guggenheim Museum. The curator’s letter was never answered; Wim probably couldn’t find the letter in the chaos or simply waited too long. Just imagine what might have happened if that letter had been answered on time. It was a moment as tragic as it was ‘Schippersesque’.

We have come a long way together over the past few years, and to my feeling, we were only at the beginning of an even longer, beautiful path. Up until the very last moment, he kept working on new pieces, productions, and presentations, and he kept thinking about music, performances, and theater. Wim leaves behind a vast legacy. Sometimes the physical distance between Hamburg and Amsterdam was great, but never too far. We miss him already.

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Fortunately, Wim T. Schippers’ unique artistic philosophy will not be lost; since the Wim T. Schippers Foundation was founded in 2024, dedicated efforts have been underway to preserve and continue his monumental legacy.