The Brooklyn Rail

Mia Westerlund Roosen’s interest in sculpture’s explicit relationship to the body becomes palpable when you hang out between Heat and Conical (both 1981), two monumental works that anchor Then and Now, her current exhibition at Nunu Fine Art. Though the artist has been making art steadily and successfully for nearly six decades, her extensive body of work seems continually—almost criminally—overlooked. As her first New York presentation in four years, this economical but wide-ranging show offers a hopeful corrective.

The power of Heat and Conical electrifies the gallery space. Like when standing at the precipice of a cliff, the viewer is simultaneously drawn in and repelled. From afar, the pair seems foreboding; Heat, a thirteen-foot-tall structure, posits a forceful thrust toward the ceiling before precariously bending overhead, while Conical, resting on an unsettled fulcrum, tilts upward at both ends, an uneven seesaw. Monsters or phalluses (or monstrous phalluses) may first be called to mind, a testament to bodies in all their imperfect glory that is underscored by a close inspection of the sculptures’ surfaces. Westerlund Roosen constructed them of concrete, a material she often worked with in the first decades of her career. She then coated the mottled surface with encaustic, resulting in a distinctly epidermal texture. It’s like looking at your skin beneath a microscope.

Spending time in close proximity to the two works offers another insight, too: in tandem, they morph from superficial disquiet to formal elegance. Standing between them, it becomes clear that Heat and Conical are involved in a sculptural pas de deux, a subtle but complex dance with which your own body becomes complicit. The once-menacing arcs make room for innate pleasure. Perhaps this is by design, for Westerlund Roosen refers to her sculpture as a practice rooted in what she playfully calls “eccentric reductivism,” which has its origins in her early response to Minimalism, the dominating ethos that defined the artistic landscape in the early years of her career. Where Minimalism demanded dispassion and severity, Westerlund Roosen responded with organic sculpture that felt distinctly human, even as she explored some of its other tenets, such as spartan form, humble materials, and seriality. Rather than producing works with technical, unblemished surfaces, Westerlund Roosen joyfully embraced mark making as an inherent quality of sculpture, as the pitted, irregular exteriors of both Heat and Conical attest.

Her commitment to the embedded life force within her objects is elsewhere on display in smaller works in the show. The earliest sculpture on view, Maquette for V Mound (1978), consists of a small slab of concrete coated with lead, its otherwise smooth, black surface visibly chafed and scratched. Though Westerlund Roosen considers her drawings distinct from her sculptural pursuits, this cross-hatching effect is notably present in a number of the two-dimensional works. The artist largely eschews preparatory drawings, though she will frequently refer to her sculptures on paper after the fact. Heat 1 and Heat 3 (both 1981) are abstract charcoal drawings of forms that are distinctly reminiscent of the sculpture in the gallery. The scratchy nature of her marks on paper likewise echo the distinct human traces that distinguish her three-dimensional pieces.

In the gallery’s entryway, a recent sculpture commands attention. Sac (2019) digresses from the more imposing works to reveal another facet of Westerlund Roosen’s practice. She has long incorporated fabric into her objects, and here, a cylinder of textile has been encased half by concrete and half by resin, a more recent material. The resulting, tabletop sculpture is unfailingly vulnerable, a swaddled baby left on a doorstep—or a distorted membrane. Just as the two monumental works strongly provoke both aversion and delight, Sac, with its distinctly corporeal connotations, is capable of arousing pity or tenderness, parental tendencies or bodily anxieties. Westerlund Roosen’s eccentric reductivism may rub against the grain of Minimalism’s established principles, but it is no less insistent or intricate in its doctrine, and perhaps is even more humane. May the reconsideration of her work and all its possibilities continue to unfold.