Biography
Marie-José van den Hout opened a small gallery on the Lage Hezelstraat in Nijmegen, a Dutch city on the banks of the River Waal, in the province of Gelderland in 1979. At first, she showed jewellery made by her brother in the front room of the gallery, and fine art in a white-tiled room at the back of the building. After a few years, van den Hout decided she wanted to specialise in a different kind of jewellery so, in 1987 the gallery moved to a larger space on Ganzenheuvel and began to show jewellery by local artists such as Herman Hermsen and Nel Linssen, who both lived in Nijmegen.
In 1989, van den Hout, organised an exhibition of 100 combs made by international jewellery artists which, after br=eing shown in Nijmegen and at the Boymans van Beuningen Museum in Rotterdam, it travelled to Japan, Germany, Italy and Switzerland, and brought Marzee international recognition. The gallery moved again in 1995 to a former grain store on the banks of the river Waal which was restored from a ruin to house the gallery and the Marzee Collection. The building, originally named De Gouden Schepel (The Golden Bushel), was constructed in 1904 using beams from a seventeenth century structure on the same site and renovated by architects Bert Dirxx and Peter Groot of Dirrix Van Wylick Architects in Eindhoven. With the addition of a seven metre high glass house on the side of the building, an iron staircase running through the centre and high windows replacing the shutters to give a view across the river, Marzee is now a magnificent four-storey structure with an unprecedented 850m2 of exhibition space, making it the largest independent gallery for jewellery in the world.
