Mia Westerlund Roosen: Then and Now
Nunu Fine Art New York is pleased to announce Then and Now, the first solo exhibition of New York-based artist Mia Westerlund Roosen (b. 1942) with the gallery. This collection of sculpture and drawing showcases works from the 1970s to the present and investigates the artist’s expansive ideas about how materiality relates to the human condition.
Mia Westerlund Roosen began sculpting at a time when the practice was governed by a series of strict rules imposed by influential figures such as Donald Judd and Robert Morris, whose specific ideas about how sculpture should be made (by machine) and what it should express (nothing aside from itself) dominated the previous decade. Westerlund Roosen felt that these rules should be challenged, and that the hand of the artist and its impact on the resulting work ought to be considered legitimate means of both formal exploration and aesthetic inquiry.
While Westerlund Roosen adopted and modified strategies from her contemporaries, such as seriality, austere form, and the utilization of common materials like concrete, her interests are singular. The artist confronted impersonal aesthetics to probe the fundamental, organic nature of materials and to examine how it might correspond to the human body. Heat, 1981, encaustic and concrete, is a powerful example of the artist’s astute manipulation of scale in search of a visceral reaction from the viewer. Conical yet arching, the form is covered with dappled bronze and brown tones, the color and texture of the waxy encaustic evoking Westerlund Roosen’s favored illusionistic metaphor, skin. The artist’s laborious marks are prominently scattered across the brown-gray surface, evincing her hand as she smeared and scraped the encaustic over the concrete. While clearly recalling organic shapes and elements of the human body, at nearly thirteen feet high, the work pushes the artist’s conception of “living sculpture” toward monumentality and exemplifies her studies on how sensuality can be crafted from the mundane.
The exhibition includes several of Westerlund Roosen’s recent drawings in addition to drawings from the 1970s. These drawings, executed in pastel and oil stick at both large and small scales and rarely shown, are the artist’s attempt to further interpret and understand the material properties of the world around her. In works such as Gray Series I – V, Westerlund Roosen skillfully captures the appearance of asphalt, concrete, and fiber by detailing the minute pockmarks and subtly shading the surface gradations of each. This engagement with physicality and texture has driven her drawing practice for decades. The drawings are distinct, separate investigations from her sculptural practice, yet are correlated by their shared interest in material scrutiny.
Throughout her practice, Mia Westerlund Roosen has prioritized the gesture and movement of the artist’s hand to emphasize the personal, organic quality she admired, cultivating a sense of intimacy to each work and reinforcing the centrality of the artist to the process of creation and the subsequent transmission of creative energy into the viewer via the object.