Published by Valiz. Text by Wim Van Mulders, Hanne Hagenaars.
Breasts, silver mushrooms, a melancholy fir tree, giant slippers, a water tower with a crazy red wig, pricks dangling from a string, milk cans: these are a sampling from the ten works that Maria Roosen has chosen for this substantial volume, which is further buttressed with texts by Hanne Hagenaars and Wim Van Mulders.
Dutch artist Maria Roosen loves magic. Not so much witchcraft as the small everyday wonders--like the way a drop of oil in a puddle of water suddenly reflects the world in 1,000 colors. Glass is one of Roosen's primary materials, and she is best known for her little glass carrots; her glass eyes; her glass penises dangling from a cord, somehow at once sweet and sorrowful, and calling to mind the work of Eva Hesse or Louise Bourgeois. Roosen also makes big white papier-mĒche spheres that she gives to her friends, asking them to make alter-ego faces on them and to wear them over their heads, or to share them with others at public events. In this sturdy accordion-folded book we are introduced to Maria's friends--in their masks--via a series of photographic portraits, while Hanne Hagenaars tells us about their adventures.
Published by Valiz. Essays by Hans den Hartog Jager and Jennifer Allen.
Glass breasts, penises dangling from strings, hand-knit sunflowers, toilets decorated with hunting scenes, the images in Maria's bring readers into Dutch baby-boomer Maria Roosen's lyrical and mischievous artistic universe. She has designed slippers for a giant and made an outsized rosary for a medieval statue, and frequently smuggles her cheekier work into everyday life by combining it with existing objects--nestling a pair of glass breasts in a Chesterfield chair, tucking two more into bed, and anchoring a pale orange tent with a series of louche-looking blown-glass pitchers. Her evocations and provocations of masculinity and feminity, in sculpture, installation and works on paper, in uncommon materials and a wealth of sensual forms, echo and challenge artists such as Eva Hesse and Louise Bourgeois. Maria's tracks Roosen's work of the last seven years, and includes highlights from further back, ranging from the intimate to the monumental.
Maria Roosen: My Friends, Mis Amigos, Mes Amis, I Miei Amici, Meine Freunde, Mijn Vrienden
Maria Roosen: Maria's