And why the naked suits? Is the idea to make visitors feel more vulnerable to the experience?

Image Visitors to the exhibition are asked to don “naked costumes” featuring various shapes and sizes of male and female genitalia. Credit... Michel de Groot for The New York Times

“It’s a way of getting them out of their clothes without undressing them,” Mr. Urban said. “With clothes, you know immediately that someone is a banker or something else and when you get them out of their own clothes they can be anybody.”

The Boijmans van Beuningen is probably best known for its large collection of early Dutch and Flemish paintings, which include works by Pieter Bruegel the Elder and Hieronymus Bosch, Renaissance artists who explored drolleries, grotesque hybrid beings, and people and animals engaged in all kinds of coarse behavior. The museum also has a collection of surrealist art.

“If you look into the work of Gelatin, you see that they very often refer to those artists,” Mr. Ex said. “The strange performances that they do and even the costumes — you put on one of their costumes and look like you come from one of those paintings. It’s not a re-enactment of Bosch or Bruegel, but it’s a kind of mentality that belongs to this museum.”

Mr. Ex said he had anticipated that the show might cause a sensation and that there would be some adverse reactions from visitors. In the weeks since the exhibition opened, however, Dutch art critics have mostly been receptive of the work, although there have been negative comments on the museum’s Facebook page.

“We are a free space, so we can do things that are silly and also maybe a sign of bad taste,” Mr. Ex said. “This is a museum, here is a place where artists work and we have to defend the freedom of showing things, so there’s a bigger side to it.”

But, he added, “so far, my experience is that people just enjoyed it and had fun with it.”