Press Release Previews Kalliopi Lemos, Marc Mulders, Diana Scherer

PREVIEW KALLIOPI LEMOS
Kalliopi Lemos (1951) was born in Greece and currently lives and works in London. She made a name in the Netherlands with the metre-high sculpture The Plait, which was unveiled in Rotterdam on International Women’s Day 2021. The sculpture is located on the Westersingel and serves as a beacon of female power and sensuality. The braid towers over its surroundings, unyielding but also refined thanks to the many steel wires that are interwoven into it. This radical seductiveness is a classic characteristic of Lemos’ work.

As a sculptor, installation artist and painter, Lemos is known from London to Berlin and from New York to Athens. Her large-scale work addresses current themes such as the unequal fate of boat refugees and the oppression of women. Her presentation at ROOF-A offers an opportunity to get to know her more closely through drawings, collages, and sculptures in which organic, feminine shapes predominate. These shapes are carriers of fertility and resilience, like germs of plants and other curved calyxes from which life itself flows.

PREVIEW MARC MULDERS
Marc Mulders (Tilburg, 1958) is one of the Netherlands’ most important artists, with work on display in almost every major museum. He’s a painter pur sang and stays close to the heart of nature and the process of growth and flowering. With soft, shimmering colours and brushstrokes, he zooms in on flower fields in the morning and evening twilight. In his work, the cycle of life unfolds in an enchanting light – an almost abstract opulence, as if the colour nuances of petals start swirling on a breath of wind.

Painting and nature reunite in Mulders’ ode to creation. His outdoor studio is located on the Baest estate in North Brabant, with fields full of flowers he has planted himself. Mulders also portrays their decline. Still, while he made a name for himself with his vanitas still lifes full of dying game, he increasingly emphasises beauty as a theme in his work. For ROOF-A, he created two paintings: a large and a small canvas, both full of blossoms in abundant light, offering a counterbalance to all the suffering in the world.

PREVIEW DIANA SCHERER
Would it be possible for a garment to grow under the ground? Diana Scherer (b. Lauingen, Germany, 1972) works with root systems of plants. Her studio is an artificial biotope, where many shades of leafy green light up. Here, she allows natural tissues to grow into works of art. Scherer presents the underground crops and root networks of her plants as a tapestry, but she also integrates them into photo works, as a living sculpture, or as textile.

For her, nature, science, art, and design are an extension of each other. To add even more depth to her work, Scherer collaborates with biologists and engineers from Delft University of Technology and Radboud University in Nijmegen. In 2016, she won the New Material Award from Het Nieuwe Instituut in Rotterdam. Still, her work is more of an innovative, poetic exploration than exact science. The human urge to control is finely relativised by the impulsive, natural, and unpredictable nature of plant dynamics.

Tekst: Wilma Sütö