the hague becomes an open-air museum of inflatable art during blowup jubilee
By kat barandy I designboom
Across The Hague’s Museum Quarter, bright inflatable forms rise beside the Hofvijver, slip between historic facades, and turn the city center into a walkable route of color and air. BlowUp Jubilee 2026 opens across the Dutch city today, May 29th, bringing together the past five years of BlowUp Art Den Haag in one expanded anniversary edition that runs through June 21st.
The exhibition gathers large-scale works by Dutch and international artists across public space, especially around Lange Voorhout and the Hofvijver. The project treats the city as an open-air museum, with inflated pavilions, floating objects, reflective forms, and architectural gestures placed where people already move through the city. Entry is free, which keeps the route close to the original idea of BlowUp Art: art outside the gallery, encountered at street level.
Air does much of the structural work here, but the works across The Hague’s BlowUp Jubilee reach beyond novelty. These pieces rely on volume, pressure, fabric, seams, color, and the surrounding architecture to hold their presence. A work can appear soft and temporary while still changing the weight of an historic square or the mood of a waterside view.
Among the returning works are Raw Color’s Compressed Cylinders, which packs bright inflatable columns into a glass container, and John Körmeling’s enormous yellow donut, The Ever-Beating Calendar. Studio Ossidiana dots the city with oversized, pink-hued shells, while Sigrid Calon’s Gazebo stands as a pink pavilion. Steve Messam’s Crested appears as a red spiked headdress, Marcel Wanders contributes reflective Eggs, and Studio Job floats a cooking pot across the water with Like a Pan in the Water.
The Hague gives BlowUp Jubilee its tension, as the long tree-lined stretches of its Museum Quarter introduce the inflatables to brick, stone, water, and historic civic spaces. Their scale shifts with each setting. Some works feel almost architectural, while others read like bright interruptions in a historic postcard.
BlowUp Art Den Haag began in 2022 as part of BinnenhofBuiten, an initiative by The Hague & Partners commissioned by the municipality while the Binnenhof undergoes renovation. That context still shapes the project. The closed political complex becomes the reason for a cultural route outside it, turning construction and inaccessibility into a reason to keep the area active.
Studio Mieke Meijer, Airboretum
For this jubilee edition, earlier works return in new combinations, giving visitors a loose survey of how the exhibition has grown. The artist list includes Raw Color, Marcel Wanders, Studio Job, Yamuna Forzani, Paul Cournet, Kiki & Joost, Sigrid Calon, Steve Messam, Theo Botschuijver, Studio Mieke Meijer, Adrianus Kundert, Fransje Killaars, Eugenie Boon, and John Körmeling, among others.
The appeal comes from the way the installations make public space feel temporarily rearranged. A familiar pond gains a floating kitchen object. A façade meets a purple loop. A boulevard receives a red inflatable crown. BlowUp Jubilee uses the lightest material imaginable to change how people look at the city, giving The Hague a month of playful scale shifts without removing it from its own streets.
Raw Color, Compressed Cylinders
Larissa Ambachtsheer, Keep me in balance
This article was originally published by Designboom.