Australia and Morocco Revisited: The Materialized Travel Memories of Dutch Visual Artist Theo Kuijpers

This chapter considers the work of Dutch artist Theo Kuijpers (b. 1939). Traveling, gaining impressions, and processing and visualizing impressions and images is the thread that runs through Kuijpers’s nearly sixty-year career. Kuijpers has visited many countries, including Egypt, Indonesia, Iceland, Italy, and France. The two countries that impressed him the most were Morocco and Australia, to which he has made repeat visits. In order to determine to what extent and how Kuijpers resumed this earlier work of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s in the art he produced later in his long and productive career, this chapter examines the series of works that Kuijpers made based on the memories of his various journeys to Morocco and Australia. More specifically, the chapter investigates how Kuijpers’s early travel experiences and the output from that earlier period have affected his more recent work. Aspects covered are the multi-layeredness of Kuijpers’s work; the tension between present and past and between presence and memory in his work; and autobiographic memory and the return to the past in later life.