With that, the 62 year-old Flemish artist Jan Vanriet opened his exhibition Closing Time at Antwerp’s Royal Museum of Fine Arts.

That he is tired is no wonder, given the scale of the project. That he is just “satisfied” reflects a modesty one wouldn’t expect from someone whose paintings are on display side-by-side with the museum’s masterpieces, including works by Rubens, Van Eyck and Memling.

For its final exhibition before closing for four years of renovation works, the museum asked Antwerp-born Vanriet to select 150 works from the permanent collection and present them alongside a similar number of his own pieces. As the museum’s curator Leen de Jong says, the museum’s collection is now presented “in a totally new context”.

It’s a bold and daring project. While it isn’t the first time a contemporary artist has been shown “in dialogue” with a museum collection, it’s unusual for it to happen on this scale. Vanriet was given free rein to select whichever of the museum’s works he wanted, including those in the stock rooms, and then arrange them however he wanted.

“To do this with these kinds of masterpieces, it’s unbelievable,” Vanriet told me. A once in a lifetime experience? “Yes,” he replies, “for me and for the museum.”

The works are arranged around 20 themes, each with a story to tell. Vanriet generally selected one or two works and then built each thematic room around those paintings, making connections through the subject, the colours or the particular shapes.

Take, for example room 12, entitled “Maikaefer, Flieg!” (“Maybug, Fly!”), the title of a nursery rhyme and also of three paintings by Vanriet based on a documentary film in which a daughter of Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels sings the song. Several of Vanriet’s other paintings in this room feature singers, dancers and actors from German revues of the 1930s and are about artists who collaborated with the Nazis or who were interned in the concentration camps and required to perform for their guards.

Next to one such portrait, “Signal”, is James Ensor’s “Astonishment of the Mask Wouse”, reflecting the ideas of cabaret, the stage and masks. Vanriet has also chosen a work picturing wrestlers in a barracks by Henri Evenepoel, a painting by Jules Pascin of a seemingly innocent girl and Georg Grosz’s portrait of the author Walter Mehring, a victim of the Nazis.

Connections with the Second World Ware present elsewhere, too, such as in the “Transport” room, which takes on a personal dimension for Vanriet, whose parents were in the resistance, betrayed and transported to concentration camps. They survived, finding each other after the war and marrying.

“I come from a family that was defined to an extreme extent by the war,” Vanriet said in a 2002 interview quoted in the book accompanying the exhibition. “There are two ways of dealing with this. You can either say that you reject it, that you don’t want to work on it any more. Or else it remains a theme. Apparently in my case, it has continued to make its demands.”

The room entitled “The Flight”, contains six portraits by Vanriet of people deported from Mechelen to Auschwitz. The paintings are based on photographs from a recent documentary on the more than 18,000 people who suffered this fate. The portraits share the room with other works linked with persecution and flight in different contexts, for example, Joachim Patinir’s 16th-century painting “The Flight into Egypt” and Flemish artist Gustave De Smet’s “Vrouw van Spakenburg” (“Woman of Spakenburg”, painted during his stay in the Netherlands as a war refugee.

Sometimes the connection between two works is more visual than thematic, such as “Women on the Rokin” by George Hendrik Breitner, a late 19th-century scene of two women in black with slightly blurred faces walking through the city, and Vanriet’s “Marrano, Identifying Mark”, a painting in similarly neutral tones dominated by two dark figures.

To put Closing Time together, Vanriet had to make countless choices. For his own works, he opted to include only those from approximately the last 20 years. The artist, who studied at Antwerp’s Royal Academy for the Arts, explains that there is a common thread running through his works from this period and so they tell “a coherent story”.

Choosing which works to take from the permanent collection took many months. The reasoning for exploring works in the stockrooms was twofold: on the one hand, Vanriet wanted to show works unknown to today’s public, and, on the other, it set in motion something new, creating fresh ideas and connections. The artist says, for instance, that the discovery of De Smet’s “White Shirt on Black Ground” created a “special tension” and lifted the tone of his own series “Women in the Forest”.

Virtually all the museum’s rooms were emptied in order to hang the selected paintings in their new places. “It’s been all hands on deck in the last few weeks,” Vanriet says.

The only area to have had minimal disruption was the Rubens room, renamed here “Propaganda”. Almost all of the Flemish master’s paintings are left hanging in their usual spots, with Vanriet simply adding his own canvases in-between the scenes of papal orthodoxy. One of them, “Marrano, Trace”, also known as “the painting with pebbles”, is inspired by a path in the Alhambra, with the loose stones alluding to the Jewish custom of placing pebbles on a grave.

Another is “Fire, Black”, a 2x2 metre painting of a burning synagogue, alluding to “Kristallnacht” of 1938 when the Nazis plundered and destroyed the possessions of thousands of Jews.

The last room, “Exit”, differs from the others – “my vanity over here”, Vanriet jokes, as the visitor is faced with a wall of photographs of the artist himself. The photographs, which include shots of a much younger Vanriet and of him painting the ceiling of the Bourla theatre, were all taken by his friend Herman Selleslags, who has been following and recording his life for several decades. A fitting conclusion to such an ambitious and well-executed exhibition.

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Four-year facelift

Jan Vanriet’s aptly named Closing Time will be the final exhibition staged at the Royal Museum of Fine Arts in Antwerp until 2014. The museum will close in October to carry out major structural works to improve safety and waterproofing of the Neo-Classical building, as well as add an extension of the public areas and galleries. During the €44 million project, about 120 of the museum’s most important works will be transferred to the new Museum aan de Stroom, Antwerp’s new museum, due to open next year. Other works from the Fine Arts Museum will be exhibited elsewhere in Belgium and overseas. The museum is already preparing its opening exhibition in 2014: Ruben’s influence on artists from Van Dyck to Picasso.