Art route through the canals of Groningen.

At the bottom of the bridge at the Groninger Museum, the Belgian artist Wim Delvoye has made a tile tableau. He was inspired by the Delft blue pottery, which gives the tableau an old Dutch feel. The eight tiles depict fictional 'children's games', such as urinating in the direction of a wind machine, causing you to wet yourself and letting wind to start a windmill.

Pass under the Emma Bridge and look directly behind you. Sculptor Willem Reijers designed this work of art for the then new bridge in 1958. The work is called Traffic (Het Verkeer). Reijers wanted to depict the constant flow of traffic that enters the city every day at this point and has to slow down before the bridge.

As you pass you will see an eight meter high sculpture of a woman on the left: Ultra. At first glance, she lives up to well-known beauty ideals and appears impressively high on her feet. The skirt of her enormous dress is draped over a so-called 'crinoline'.
But the woman turns out to be a doll whose ratio between the upper and lower body is not right. Her legs dangle under the see-through skirt. She has, as it were, elevated herself in the crinoline on wheels, because she cannot live up to the usual beauty ideal of long legs, and moves with prosthetic arms.

Tern on Sphere (Stern op bol) on top of the guard house of the Museum Bridge is one of the fifty statues that 'city sculptor' Willem Valk made for buildings in Groningen and beyond. The special green color of the artwork and the roof is due to the material: copper discolours under the influence of the outside air.

Immediately after the Museum Bridge you will find An oasis in the city on your right. Nowadays Art Academy Minerva is located in this building, but until 2008 the Nature Museum was located here. This museum asked artist Noud de Wolf to devise a plan for the adjacent public garden. Among other things, he devised a winding path that leads to a fountain in the middle. The city garden was given the title An oasis in the city because it would be a resting point and place for reflection for city walkers and visitors to the museum.

Just past the city garden you will find the most beautiful public toilet in the Netherlands, where you can combine the useful with the pleasant. The toilet was designed by architect Rem Koolhaas and photographer Erwin Olaf.

The round toilet consists of two curved walls of milk glass, which together form the yin and yang sign. What is special about this toilet block is that it not only has a section for men, but also for women, each with its own entrance. A photo collage of Erwin Olaf can be seen in the milk glass walls. The photos depict 'the battle of the sexes'.

On the left you see the word DAMALS on the side wall of the warehouse 'Werkmanhuis'. The word has been placed there in memory of the Groningen printer and artist Hendrik Nicolaas Werkman, who had his printing business here from 1923, until he was murdered by the Germans in 1945.

Artist Peter de Kan was inspired by The Next Call, a series of nine cahiers that Werkman published between 1923 and 1926. For the ninth and final Next Call, Werkman wrote the poem Damals, in which despondency and resignation as well as longing and a longing for a lost paradise resound.

When you almost pass under the Ebbingebrug, stop for a moment and look on the right side of the Diepenring for the real estate agency on the corner of the Oude Ebbingestraat. A sandstone deer is attached to the corner of this property.

In the past, the deer (and especially the deer head and deer horn) were often used as a sign by drugstore owners and pharmacists. From stag horn, stag horn salt or quick salt was obtained, which served as a stimulant for fainting.

Henk Visch's oeuvre is characterized above all by its enigma. This bronze statue next to the terrace of the Harbor Café shows a man in a kind of yoga pose, resting on his fingertips. The mysteriousness of his works is often reinforced by the titles, such as Secret Life in a Public Body in this case. Does Visch mean by the public body his image or the place where it stands? And what are those secrets?

This blue square symbolizes the window to the world. Behind it is a long blue sofa. For his design, artist Manuel de Solà-Morales envisioned “a kind of sitting room (..) where one can quietly enjoy the rich and varied panorama that the city and water have to offer”.

There has been quite a bit of talk about the image of this girl ('Blote Bet') on the Herebrug. Sculptor Wladimir de Vries – who also made the Wisent sculpture in the Noorderplantsoen – was not satisfied with the execution of his design. In his original design, the girl held the ears of corn with both hands, but this has not been adopted in the bronze foundry. According to him, the ears of the calf were also set back too much, making the calf more like a sheep. He also did not like that certain welds were still visible and that parts of the image did not fit together properly.

Not only the artist was dissatisfied with the result. Initially, many inhabitants of the city had difficulty with the nakedness of the statue. In addition, many people found the girl's legs too firm and her bosom too flat.

You may need to shed some light on this with your phone's flashlight. Below the Herebrug is a photo of Rommert Boonstra printed on canvas. Boonstra made this work for the municipal photography assignment in 1994. For his photos he brought together a lot of material about characteristic buildings and works of art of the city, together with portraits of historical figures and family portraits from his own archive. Residents of Groningen could then choose from ten of his staged photos for this spot.