320 Broadway, Saratoga Springs, NY 12866           PRESS RELEASE

Progressions

Mia Westerlund Roosen, Caroline Ramersdorfer and Dorothy Dehner

June 18 th - August 13 th , 2022. Special members preview opening 5-7pm, July 17 th , 2022.

Saratoga Arts is pleased to announce a collaborative eight-week exhibition this summer, featuring the work of three prominent local women artists.

When we think of the act of progressing as a forward or onward movement, passing successively from one thing to the next, it describes well the creative process across various art forms. How chords or melodic tones follow each other, evolutions of dance steps strung together across the floor, or the preparatory sketches to finished works of art, they all follow a series of unique progressions which can hold as much beauty and interest as the finished pieces themselves.

 

Mia Westerlund Roosen, Caroline Ramersdorfer and Dorothy Dehner, have all worked and lived within an hour of Saratoga Arts for large periods of their careers and have often created monumental works in cement, marble, and metal. This exhibition allows us to see aspects of how each of these artists approach making their work with examples of drawings, prints, models, maquettes, and large-scale sculpture. Some of the work has never been publicly shown before.

 

 

Mia Westerlund Roosen

 

Born in New York with Cuban heritage, Westerlund Roosen considered two careers, one as a dancer the other as an artist.  She cites her interest in dance as the reason her sculpture often refers to the body, its sexuality, its flow, and its movement.

Emerging as a sculptor in the late 1960's when Minimalism was the dominate, artistic movement, Westerlund Roosen chose the organic over the industrial, geometric aesthetic and held on tightly to her commitment to the handmade object.

Mia Westerlund Roosen has received several prestigious awards, including a National Endowment for the Arts grant, a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, and a Fulbright Fellowship.  Her work can be seen in numerous public collections, most notably the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY; and the Storm King Art Center, Mountainville, NY.  She divides her time between New York City and Buskirk, NY. All work shown by Mia Westerlund Roosen are made possible by a generous collaboration with Betty Cuningham Gallery.

 

Image courtesy of Betty Cuningham Gallery

 

 

CAROLINE RAMERSDORFER

 

Born in Austria, Ramersdorfer makes work both in small and monumental scales.

Cross-cultural understanding is an important theme in her work, through which she tries to bridge cultures and increase tolerance and understanding. "I see being a sculptor as an active process in creating a union and finding intersecting points between art, world cultures and their decisive human factors”

She has gained an international following, with permanent installations in Europe, Asia, North America, South America, Africa, the  United Arab Emirates and the Caribbean.

She studied philosophy in Paris in 1979 before enrolling in the  International University of Art in Florence , Italy, where she studied African art history, museum science, and  Renaissance   fresco  restoration. At the same time, she studied etching for two years at the graphic art studio of the  Santa Reparata International School of Art in Florence . She entered the sculpture department at the  Academy of Fine Arts in Carrara, Italy , in 1983, receiving her MFA in 1988. She lives and works in Wells, NY.

Image courtesy of Caroline Ramersdorfer

DOROTHY DEHNER, 1901-1994

Born in Cleveland in 1901, Dehner created works in numerous media for decades. Having moved to Bolton Landing in 1940, much of Dehner's career was spent an hour away from Saratoga Arts. All work shown by Dorothy Dehner is made possible by a generous loan from the Tang Teaching Museum.

Image courtesy of Dorothy Dehner Foundation

“An artist from a young age, Dorothy Dehner has expressed herself through a variety of mediums: dance, drawing, painting, etching, and most famously, sculpture. Dehner was inspired to focus on the visual arts after a trip to Europe in 1925 which led to her subsequent enrollment in the Art Students League in New York City. It was there she met fellow student David Smith, and within a year they were married. Their marriage ushered in an oppressive period in Dehner's life in which she felt she did not have full creative control over her art. Subjected to Smith's outbursts of violence and the belittlement of her work, she eventually separated from him in 1950. The 1950s ushered in a new period in Dehner's work in which her creativity, previously suppressed, was able to fully flourish as she explored new mediums and styles.

Dehner's works from the 1950s represent a foundational period, as she shifted from realism to the abstract sculptures for which she would become most known. Many of the forms seen in these etchings and engravings reappear in Dehner's sculptural work, even years later. In works like The Maiden Aunts, or Bird-machine II, we see her interest in sculpture developing as she pushes the boundary of what is possible in two dimensions. Using shading and perspectival tricks, she forms extrusions, voids, and enclosures, creating a pseudo-three-dimensional space on the page. These shapes are tactile, with heavy intersecting lines and contrasting use of light and dark. They exude an intense energy that seems to shoot out in sharp protrusions that crisscross the page and create layers of movement. Living organisms appear filtered through a machine aesthetic, abstracting them into geometric shapes and lines. The prints and paintings you see here are a testament to Dorothy Dehner's lifelong commitment to art and to her freedom as an artist and individual.”         

-Theo Carol, Skidmore College class of 2023