Wall relief 1968

Location: Athene building 
Donated by RCN (now ECN) upon the opening of the building.

When an artist does not have a concrete picture for a work, his creativity can be expressed to the full. That much becomes clear from this bronze relief by the Rotterdam artist Den Breems (1931), who has fallen into oblivion.

The subject is the atom. Den Breems made a whimsical, almost graphic sculpture that represents materialization or the path of atomic nuclei. It was presented by the then Energie Centrum Nederland upon the opening of the Athene building in 1968, where research was then conducted with radioactive material.

Den Breems, who started out as an electrician before following the Art Academy, always regarded himself more as an artist than as a sculptor. This relief shows a nice balance between those two activities and demonstrates how a technical training can bear interesting fruit.

See also: Vubis database