Working with Industrielicht b.v and the Chez-Moi Ton Schulten Gallery to enhance the visitor experience, filling their senses with vibrant colours and shapes within the Dutch art gallery.
Over the last 15 years, the Chez-Moi Ton Schulten Gallery in Ootmarsum, Netherlands, has become a meeting point for contemporary art lovers. Here, Tom Schulten’s work serves as a magnet that draws people in. His latest paintings and silkscreens are on display within a backdrop of elegance. However, Chez-Moi is much more than just a gallery. It has grown into a temple of beauty where visitors find tranquillity and allow the colours and shapes to fill their senses.
Representation of colours and shapes is vital to the overall gallery experience. The gallery’s management team sought an LED lighting solution from a manufacturer with a long history of product longevity and consistency to replace its 600 50 W Halogen dimmable ten-degree spotlights to enhance the artworks on display.
The exhibits are extremely valuable. The display lighting is designed to accentuate the colour-rich artwork, with multiple spotlights shining on each painting from various angles. Due to this complex arrangement, there must be very little colour difference, if any, between each spotlight.
Therefore, the new LED lighting had to meet some stringent requirements. Firstly, the chosen product had to provide a natural beam unhindered by zoom lenses or reflectors. The current lumen output had to be matched with a good CRI for consistency across the current colour arrangement. Lastly, the spotlight needed to be compatible with the current 3-phase track system by Hoffmeister.
Working closely with the gallery and Industrielicht lighting consultants, alphaLED’s Apto creative range of track mounted spotlights was the chosen solution. Apto is an excellent tool for creating focal points within a space or highlighting displays.
Like the entire alphaLED range, Apto features Xicato light engines. In this case, the Xicato Inside™ XTM Vibrancy LED module perfectly met the brief. Apto’s white diecast aluminium construction blends seamlessly with the gallery architecture, but where it scores is in its outstanding light quality, boasting attributes of 98 CRI, 1000 lumen output with a 2-step MacAdam Ellipse.
The Vibrancy Artist Series generates light that not only matches the colour rendering quality of halogen; it is also less damaging because it radiates less energy in the harmful, blue-violet, and UV spectrum. Even beyond other LEDs. Which ensures no colour change occurs in the artwork throughout the years. The final design brings complete colour consistency across the gallery.
Gary Lyon, Director, alphaLED, comments, “We use Xicato Inside™ for all our lighting fixtures as we know how important light quality is to our customers. There is no comparison on the market today. They have the only 10-year warranty for lumen and colour, which provides the ultimate confidence in our products.”
Bas van Driel, Technical Lighting Design, Industrielicht, adds, “The combination of alphaLED and Xicato Inside™ is worth gold, especially when it comes to the colour saturation of the artworks, which are often made up of primary colours red, blue, and green. The rich colours are shown to perfection under this top-notch quality track lighting. The gallery management team is delighted with the final result of the project.”
Furthermore, the Apto spotlight fits easily into the existing Hoffmeister track as specified.
Ton Schulten, Chez-Moi Ton Schulten Gallery Owner, and Artist, comments, “After sampling the Apto spotlight, in-gallery, against a competitive, similar fixture, the difference in colour quality was instantly visible. It quickly became obvious that the lighting offered by Apto is superior with the light illumination within the appropriate range of the 15° beam angle. There was no colour aura around the outer edge or centre of the light beam. Also, alphaLED and Industrielicht’s impressive customer service and fast product delivery ensured the project was completed on time.”
Project credits:
Photographer: Albert Brunsting Fotografie
Partner- Industrielicht b.v
Lighting supplier – alphaLED
Light sources: Xicato
Technical lighting design: Bas van Drie
