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8/4/2006

The renovated museum

Stedelijk Museum Schiedam, Schiedam

DIRECTOR: Diana Wind
CURATOR: Wilma Suto

Maria Roosen: Maria’s Maria’s!
9 April - 25 June 2006

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, Miro' 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-mache'. 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.

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Tomas Schats. Drawings and Animations
9 April - 2 July 2006

Tomas Schats (Eindhoven 1976) makes clear line drawings from which everything superfluous has been omitted. They are miniatures created in pencil and displayed against a blindingly clean and white background. The narratives he tells are layered and occasionally take unexpected turns. Tomas Schats says himself: 'In their minimal linearity, these drawings resemble cartoons but they are, in their simplicity, more lyrical and more ambiguous, wry, but nevertheless light-footed. They are based on reality, but transcend it is a subtle manner. They tell stories about humankind, with all its possibilities and limitations. An example of this is the pen drawing called Trap (Stairs), dating from 2002, in which a person takes an unforeseen step.'

The exhibition in the Stedelijk Museum Schiedam is the very first presentation of the work of Tomas Schats in a museum context. Schats graduated from the Academy of Art in Den Bosch in 2001. That same year, he received the Lucas Prize, which is awarded annually to the most promising young talent who graduates from this Academy. Since them his work has been displayed at art initiatives and in various art galleries in the Netherlands. Thanks to illustrations in the VPRO (broadcasting station) radio and television guide and recently in the Volkskrant daily newspaper, Schats's drawings have gained renown among a wider public. Schats regards himself as an animator rather than a draughtsman. His films have been shown in several broadcasts of VPRO's Nachtpodium and at the Holland Animation Film Festival (Utrecht, 2004). His drawings come to life, as it were, in his animations. These three animations have been included in the exhibition in the Stedelijk Museum Schiedam.

The Stedelijk Museum Schiedam also requested Tomas Schats to create the signage for the renovated museum building. His drawings can be permanently admired at several strategic points in the museum.

In 2001 Schats created the Fisherman's Friend book, with texts he conceived himself. It contains everyday observations recorded in a distant and meticulous manner: 'the shining layer that arises on a damp cloth when you wring it, the moment at which the water almost comes out of the cloth'. Furthermore, all kinds of platitudes have been included, sayings that people utter is certain situations, such as 'it's going around' when someone is ill. Another text in the book is a reflection on apparently simple things.

They radiate a melancholic and occasionally slightly desperate ambience: 'so much wind is blowing into my face and I can breathe so little of it', or 'sleeping is something you always do alone'. Such observations can be the stimulus to create a drawing. The corresponding text is written under the drawing so that it functions as an explanation of the picture. A book containing all the drawings that are on display in the exhibition in the Stedelijk Museum Schiedam is available (€ 10.00).


PRESS CONTACT: Vincent van de Kerk, phone: (+49-69) 299882-118, fax: (+49) 299882-240, e-mail: vincent.van.de.kerk@stedelijksmuseumschiedam.nl

Image: Maria Roosen, Paren (fragment), 2006

Stedelijk Museum Schiedam
Hoogstraat 112 3111 HL Schiedam The Netherlands
Hours of opening: Tuesday to Sunday, from 10.00-17.00
Closed on Mondays, Christmas Day, and New Year's Day
Admission: € 5,- adults € 2,50 for Museumcard holders, Senior citizens, City of Rotterdam card, Students and children from 4 to 12 year
Free admission: Wednesdays + children under 4 + ICOM + membership Museum

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