Mia Westerlund Roosen

Mia Westerlund Roosen, Box 2, epoxy resin, 16" x 16" x 47", 2020. Mia Westerlund Roosen (born 1942) is an American sculptor known for largely abstract, often monumental works that reference the body, eroticism, and primal forms.

Westerlund Roosen emerged as a sculptor during the male-dominated ascendancy of minimalism, and was one of a handful of women represented by renowned art dealer Leo Castelli in the 1970s and 1980s. Critics such as Saul Ostrow and Lilly Wei characterize her art as postminimalist and feminist-influenced, noting its privileging of organic form, handmade processes and surfaces, and evocative possibilities. Wei placed Westerlund Roosen among a pioneering group of women that "breached the barricades of Minimalism," individually producing work whose "distinctive, even eccentric forms and wide range of materials served as a rebuttal to the rational geometries, serialization, coolness, and crushing industrial scale" of that movement. and Storm King Art Center, and appeared in shows at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal, and SculptureCenter, Anonymous Was A Woman Award, and Fulbright grant. Her work belongs to the public art collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, National Gallery of Canada, and Albright-Knox Art Gallery, among others.

She lives and works in New York City and Buskirk, New York. She considered both dance and art as career options, ultimately studying art at the Art Students League of New York; her sculptural focus on the body, flow and movement stems in part from this early interest in dance.

Westerlund Roosen moved between New York and Toronto in the 1970s, balancing family life and a nascent art career, whose reputation she initially built through exhibitions in Canada. Early highlights include solo shows at Willard Gallery, Leo Castelli, and The Clocktower Gallery (all New York), They melded minimalist objecthood, aspects of monochromatic and shaped-canvas painting, and handmade, trowel-textured surfaces into a physicality that critics described as emotive, Playwright Edward Albee later wrote that her sculptures "seemed to have existed where they sit—wherever they sit—forever. They are truly prehistoric, and if there is a collective unconscious, then that is their domain." Critic Vivien Raynor described the juxtaposition of minimalist shapes, biomorphic association, and hand-worked surfaces in Petal Peace I (seven bent forms recalling nestled tropical shapes or fungi) or Petal Piece II (stacked breast-like protuberances) as both disconcerting and reminiscent of the forms and humor of Isamu Noguchi. Several works incorporated trenches cut into the ground, modular organic and geometric forms, and hand-finished, skin-like surfaces.

Later sculpture (1999– ) In later work, Westerlund Roosen incorporated more varied approaches, revisiting the layered and stiffened cloth methods of her earlier sculpture, exploring expressive forms bearing Renaissance and Baroque influences, and producing both smaller, statuary-like pieces and sprawling arrangements of forms and lines. Parts and Pleasures (2002) was a pink-tinted concrete work consisting of large rippled disks, irregular balls, cylinders, and rope-like forms strewn across the floor, whose repetition and connection suggested a vaguely functional system that had rapidly dissipated. Janet Koplos interpreted the work's bursting of bounds, loss of control and release as a visualization of the "tension and dissolution" of a woman’s orgasm. These expressive, somewhat ungainly works featured wavy flaps and curlicues of stiffened felt that cantilevered out from upright supports or trunks and seemed frozen in time and space (e.g., the Dervish, Carmelite and Falls series, 2004–5).

In the "Bridges" series (2014–5), Westerlund Roosen returned to the minimal, monolithic approaches of her early work, setting elementary, rectangular concrete forms atop one another in simple, rigorous compositions marked by uneven edges, rounded corners, bowed planes and visible imperfections that emphasized her creative process. Art historian Sidra Stich wrote that the series conveyed "a primal moment when art emerges as an evocative presence, resolute and personalized." Her work belongs to the public collections of the Albany Museum of Art, Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Metropolitan Museum of Art, National Gallery of Canada, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Vancouver Art Gallery, and Yale University Art Gallery, among others.