From 21 July 2026, the exhibition Antikamer by Max Schulze will be on view in the Museum Café of Museum Het Schip.
In Antichamber, Max Schulze reflects on his turbulent search for a new home. Along the way, he encountered exorbitant rental prices, absurd income requirements, exploitative landlords, endless waiting lists, and spaces that were barely habitable. He depicts this search through fragments of restless walks through the city, sketches of imaginary interiors, and frameworks for what a home could be. The works balance between hope and despair, between the longing for shelter and the feeling of never truly being able to settle. Schulze's visual language moves between introspection and observation, revealing a reality that is both familiar and unsettling.
The term Antikamer originates from the French antichambre and refers to an antechamber: a room before the room. In palaces and grand houses, it was a space where visitors waited for an audience—close to the centre of power, yet not belonging to it. The antichamber has a long history within the architecture of representation and hierarchy, marking the boundary between outside and inside, admission and exclusion. It is a place where presence does not necessarily imply access. This tension forms the starting point of Schulze's work.
In this exhibition, the antichamber takes on a contemporary meaning. It is not only an architectural threshold but also a mental state: the feeling of constantly being in transition. A home can offer protection, but it can also create dependency. Schulze's work explores both the visible traces people leave in their living environments and the invisible imprints that remain within them: echoes of temporary rooms, memories of places that never became home, and the enduring question of where—and whether—we still belong.
Antikamer will be on view partly concurrently with the exhibition about the housing crisis.
Max Schulze (1994) works across a range of media, primarily painting, but also text, mixed media, and video. He graduated from the Utrecht School of the Arts (HKU) in 2016 and has lived and worked in Amsterdam ever since. He was an Artist in Residence at WOW Amsterdam and participated in the De Torenkamer residency programme of NPO Radio 1. His work has been exhibited at the Public Library Amsterdam, Kunsthal Kloof (Utrecht), and De Hallen (Amsterdam), and is part of the permanent collection of the Museum van de Geest | Dolhuys (Haarlem). A selection of his work was presented in 2025 in the exhibition Belvedere at the What Art Can Do project space in the Jordaan district, and later at the Borneo Architecture Center (BAC) on Borneo Island.
