Maria Roosen
dal 8/4/2006 al 24/6/2006
Segnalato da
8/4/2006
Maria Roosen
Stedelijk Museum Schiedam, Schiedam
Maria’s Maria’s!
Maria’s Maria’s!
After a restoration and renovation lasting more than two years, Her Majesty Queen
Beatrix opened the Stedelijk Museum Schiedam on 8 April 2006. The renovated museum
for Dutch post-war visual art presents four exhibitions. With Picasso, Klee,
Miró and modern art in The Netherlands, 1946-1958, the museum is the first to
display the influence of the three major international artists on post-war Dutch
modern art. In addition, there are two exhibitions by contemporary artists: MARIA
ROOSEN with Maria’s Maria’s! and Tomas Schats with and Animations. Furthermore,
under the title CoBrA, Cool Contemporary, Dutch post-war art from the museum’s
own collection, the renewed collection presentation is on show.
Maria Roosen furnishes life with a magical sheen. She opens up ‘a secular world of
wonders’, as Jennifer Allen writes in the recent artists’ book Maria’s (Amsterdam,
2005). With enormous sperm cells made of hand-blown glass adjoining transparent
eyeballs with expanding and contracting pupils, Maria Roosen reflects in her work
the processes of growth, transformation, acceleration and delay that are
characteristic of the dynamics of the marvellous.
The solo exhibition Maria’s Maria’s! displays an abundant selection from the oeuvre
that Maria Roosen (1957, Oisterwijk) has built up over the past ten years. Renowned
sculptures such as the voluptuous milk cans, by means of which she represented the
Netherlands at the Biennale of Venice in 1995, become components of a new spatial
setting. They are combined with work that has been specially made for this
exhibition. A museum wall is overgrown with irregular glass stars (Maria’s Maria’s!,
2006), while a sunflower of red wool winds through the monumental room (Blood
Relatives, 2006).
The exhibition invites one to explore Roosen’s most important themes: fertility and
growth, friendship and transience. In a society that seems to be moulded on hard
facts and practical usefulness, Maria Roosen gives preference to imagination. She
celebrates life in her work, in a range of materials. ‘An artist with green
fingers,’ she calls herself. ‘I sow the seed and then call in the help of others in
order to cultivate the crops.’ Roosen became famous with her cans, balls,
spermatozoids, and breasts of coloured glass, created by professional glass-blowers.
But her objects may also be made of wool, wood, or gold leaf. Her idea grows and
matures in co-operation with craftspeople such as the carpenter or knitters who
implement her new pedestal sculptures in MDF or create the woollen sunflowers.
The public enters a contemporary Wunderkammer, akin to the curiosity cabinets in
which natural phenomena were put on display during the Renaissance and the Age of
Enlightenment. The cabinets were supposed to surprise, astonish and entertain
visitors, and also teach them about the outside world. Roosen’s oeuvre achieves the
same effect. She elevated a set of antlers to an artwork; a human skull was
reproduced in confectionery. The ambiguity of these images, which originate in a
process of association and transformation, is typical of her work. Simple objects
gain eloquence by changes in scale and material. They acquire human traits or change
from typically male into typical female symbols, such as a deceitfully sensual club.
Curved shapes consistently recur, right up to the ‘Friends’ Room’ that Roosen laid
out with recent work. The walls are covered with photos of ‘close’ and ‘distant’
friends, each of whom has made a mask of an enormous ball of
papier. The ‘self-portraits’ of the close friends are combined
with the more abstract masks which arose from Roosen’s encounters during her
participation in the Trienniale of Yokohama in Japan (2005). In het Stedelijk Museum
Schiedam, the public is surrounded by all her friends: as participants and as
targets of Roosen’s inventive study of the species.
In conjunction with Valiz Publishers, the publication Maria Roosen, Mijn Vrienden,
(Maria Roosen, My Friends), (Amsterdam, 2006) will appear to accompany the
exhibition.
Stedelijk Museum Schiedam
Hoogstraat 112 - Schiedam
Hours: Tuesday-Sunday: 10am-5pm. Closed on Mondays, 25 December and 1 January