Roos Holleman – The eye caresses

Museum JAN is hosting the first solo museum exhibition by visual artist Roos Holleman. The exhibition displays a large number of new, monumental pastel drawings alongside existing work. Holleman is fascinated by the intertwined relationship between humans and nature: how we shape nature and how it shapes us. Her drawings depict an environment that is not a backdrop, but rather a mirror: transient and tender.

Dead things

While studying at the St. Joost art academy in Breda, Holleman (Tilburg, 1989) collected dead objects. "To understand life, you need death." Birds that flew into the old bell tower of the monastery, skulls and bones: she took them home to draw them. "Forms from nature fascinate me immensely, but our view of that nature fascinates me even more: how we look, organize, isolate, desire, and even erase."

Natural cosmetics

For the Cosmetics series, Holleman made drawings of moths and butterflies. These creatures are often inconspicuous and active at night. When at rest, their wings serve as camouflage on leaves or wood, but once unfolded, the most beautiful colors appear: soft pink, lilac, purple. The shape is reminiscent of a mouth with pink-painted lips.

With different eyes

In her new work, Holleman plays with a characteristic of birds of paradise that is invisible to the human eye: their fluorescent feathers. The result, executed in pastel chalk with almost radioactive colors, is alienatingly abstract. Holleman studied these birds not only in natural history museums, but also in the jungles of Papua New Guinea.

Monumental drawings

Hollemans' favorite medium is pastel chalk on paper. What is striking is the enormous size in which she works: drawings that are usually 220 cm high or long. Especially for Museum JAN, she created four works measuring no less than 240 x 300 cm. In this way, she forces the viewer into a real encounter—eye to eye—with the subject, even if it is a moth. The large format gives the animals something human; they become characters you might just encounter on the street or on the catwalk.

The eye caresses

The close-up focus on the feathers of moths and birds, combined with the powdery pastel chalk, makes Holleman's work tactile and seductive: you want to touch it. Her impressive, sensory-stimulating giant drawings come into their own in the light, spacious rooms of Museum JAN.