About Joost van Roojen

Joost van Roojen (1928–2012) started painting during the Second World War and continued doing so until the day of his death. In the six decades of his productive life he created a large body of work, consisting of meticulously painted watercolours of a very high artistic integrity. His work is unique in its visual language and use of colour, and as such difficult to characterize and classify. As a greatly independent soul he never sought to join any artistic movement and worked not much affected by outward influence. The result is an extraordinary and hermetic oeuvre of great artistic purity and unparalleled beauty.

While watercolour is often associated with a ‘sketch-like’ method of applying colour, van Roojen’s approach cannot be more different: he covered complex and very large surfaces with transparent colour, often letting colours seamlessly blend in different shades of lightness and hue. The challenge in this is that paint needs to remain liquid in the process, as otherwise shifting will occur. Furthermore, much control is needed to make sure that the edges of surfaces do not blend into adjacent shapes. The consequence of this is that the artist must work with continuously and with absolute concentration for many hours in one stretch. A marginal, but undesired, colour shift would make van Roojen decide to destroy a nearly finished work that may have taken many days to bring to that stage.

In contrast to his pursuit of technical perfection, he worked intuitively in form and use of colour: he started a new painting without a preconceived plan and, in his own words, allowed random shapes to emerge spontaneously. A new painting often formed a starting point for a series, in which a visual theme would gradually be simplified into a fragile, almost ethereal image. After achieving what he considered the essence of a form, he added elements in subsequent paintings. Continuing, he painted a story, as it were, in which visual elements developed in ‘speech and contradiction’ with each other.

In the first decades of his career, van Roojen received substantial recognition, with exhibitions in the 1960s in the Zonnehof (with Carel Visser), the Municipal Museum in The Hague (now Kunstmuseum The Hague), the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam and a major retrospective in the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven. Together with Aldo van Eyck he won the prestigious Sikkens Prize in 1961 for his mural at the playground on the Zeedijk in Amsterdam. Later, in 1993, he had major exhibitions in Museum Boymans-van Beuningen in Rotterdam and the Haags Gemeentemuseum, in 2002 again in the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam and in 2011 in the van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven as part of the 75-year overview of the museum’s existence.

In addition to his independent art, he worked as a designer and executor of monumental art projects in large buildings and public spaces. From 1958 until 1995 he completed approximately 60 major projects, including in the auditorium of the Technical University and the Ministry of Transport Laboratory in Delft (both van den Broek and Bakema), the Cantonal Court in Amsterdam (Ben Loerakker), the Dutch Embassy in Jakarta (Norbert Gawronski), Muziekcentrum Vredenburg (Concert Hall) in Utrecht and the Ministry of Social Affairs in The Hague (both Herman Herzberger).