Mia Westerlund Roosen
[8][5][9] 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.
[28][14][22] Art writers place Westerlund Roosen's work within a postminimalist tradition indebted to artists such as Eva Hesse and Louise Bourgeois, which balances formal and associative concerns and emphasizes materials, surfaces and process, the body and sexuality, and qualities such as awkwardness and uncertainty.
[3][29][2][8] She has produced work ranging from drawings to small pedestal-based objects to monumental sculpture (indoor and outdoor), using materials including resin, felt, cast concrete, lead, copper, bronze, encaustic, ceramic and plaster.
[34][35][4] Reviews in Art in America and ARTnews, compared her 1982 show at Castelli to a natural history museum exhibition, with diverse, universal, and perhaps subconscious, forms suggesting fossilized fragments or objects sharing common origins in time or place.
"[21] Her figural pieces consisted of simple structures (ranging from 15' high to palm-sized)—hulks and surging or swelling, curved forms resembling gargantuan tusks, bones and body parts—with complex, varied surfaces covered in mottled, crusty "epidermises" of encaustic or lead.
[21][29] Westerlund Roosen's SculptureCenter exhibition (1991) centered on American Beauties: nine, back-to-back breast forms assembled into a 20-foot-long, low "machine" that Michael Brenson wrote, "suggested the blades of a sexual reaper, or a battalion of baby pacifiers, or a Stone Age chariot of wrathful fire" with a "comical but irrepressible force" of sisterhood.
[23] Her 1995 exhibition at Shoshana Wayne included the indoor earthwork, Madam Mao, an enormous mound of earth (6' x 30' x 20' and 18 tons) that rose into a tapered peak crowned by a long, narrow, visceral cavity of pearly pink concrete evoking giant female genitalia.
[3] In 2010, Westerlund Roosen displayed three 10-foot-tall, concrete and architectural foam works using curved elements on New York's Upper East Park Avenue: Baritone, Juggler, and French Kiss, which conjoined comma-like forms evoking two tongues.
[43][2][44] 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.
[1] For her 2004 show, "Namesake," Westerlund Roosen exhibited five modestly scaled, abstract sculptures in poured concrete, each named for a historical or mythological woman—Althea, Magdalena, Victoria, Clio, and Iris, a calligraphic composition of tentacle-like tangles that emerged from two ovoid forms and activated interior, empty spaces.
[47][8][48] 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.
