When artist Mia Westerlund Roosen debuted her conical sculptures, which unmistakably recall phalluses, at the “25th Anniversary Exhibition of Leo Castelli” in 1982, she did so as a form of feminist protest. The exhibition, celebrating one of the postwar era’s most important galleries, had assembled together a pantheon of postwar American artists, the majority of them men. Westerlund Roosen was one of four women featured in the 29-artist exhibition.
Inclusion, however, didn’t translate into sustained recognition and attention. Rather than provoking debate, Westerlund Roosen’s work was quietly sidelined. “They just sort of ignored me,” she recently told ARTnews, recalling her sculptures being dismissed as “reductive” or “eccentric.” What was read as deviation was, in fact, a form of refusal, a refusal to remove the body from sculpture at a moment when the dominant sculptural language prized hard edges, industrial finish, and emotional distance.
Just over a decade into her career, Westerlund Roosen’s practice was already being defined by constant change, a tendency she would continue to today. In the early 1970s, after realizing that working in resin would inevitably link her to other artists like Eva Hesse, she chose to move on. “I didn’t want to stay in a material where I would always be read through someone else,” she said. She turned instead to concrete and cement—heavy materials rarely used at the time to depict the body—and began modeling forms that suggested phalluses, breasts, and other reproductive anatomy. Over the years, she added steel, copper, and lead, experimenting with how softer elements could push against or reshape rigid molds. In the 2000s, she combined her past and present materials, mixing cement with resin. “Cement isn’t really conducive to organic things,” she said. “That’s what made it interesting.”
This approach offers a key lens to view “Then and Now,” the artist’s current exhibition at Nunu Fine Art in New York (through February 21). Spanning sculpture and drawing from the 1970s to the present, the show traces Westerlund Roosen’s expansive thinking about materiality and its relationship to the human condition.
Installation view of “Mia Westerlund Roosen: Then and Now,” 2026, at Nunu Fine Art, New York, showing the artist’s 1981 sculptures Heat (background) and Conical (foreground).
Photo Martin Seck/Courtesy the artist and Nunu Fine Art
For dealer Nunu Hung, the exhibition is not about recovery or correction but resonance to our current moment. “Mia’s work embodies artistic creations that endure through time,” Hung said. “In this fast-paced era, the exhibition invites viewers to pause—to reflect across cultures and generations, and to appreciate the humility that such genuine works can offer.”
Upon entry, viewers are immediately confronted by works like Heat and Conical (both 1981), both of which extend outward from the floor in a muscular arc, their elongated, tapering forms jutting out like curved penises. The sculptures assert themselves with force: Heat rises to nearly 13 feet tall, while Conical stretches to 5 feet at its widest point. Made of concrete coated with encaustic, Heat and Conical retain a mottled, skin-like texture. The waxy overlay—tinged with yellow and pink tones and streaked with darker abrasions—appears smeared and scraped by hand. Westerlund Roosen’s materials feel bodily, even bruised. The sculptures seem less made than grown, their scale amplifying a sense of vulnerability rather than monumentality.
Mia Westerlund Roosen, Heat 1, 1981.
Courtesy the artist and Nunu Fine Art
That sense of motion continues in drawings like Heat 1 and Heat 3 (both 1981), which are not preparatory sketches for her towering sculptures but were completed afterward. Executed in charcoal and brown pastel, the works on paper act as afterimages, tracing her movements as Westerlund Roosen, a trained dancer, recalled them. Lines loop and overlap, darkening as the repeated passes of her body move through space.
If Heat and Conical establish the exhibition’s visual core, Sac (2019) is almost disarmingly much smaller. Wrapped in pale flannel and resin, its slumped, elongated form resembles a condom—soft, folded, stretched, comically flaccid even. Seen together with sculptures made decades earlier, Sac muddies Westerlund Roosen’s long engagement with masculinity: gone is the aggressive extension of Heat and Conical. What’s left instead is a fragility drawn inward.
Mia Westerlund Roosen, Sac, 2019.
Courtesy the artist and Nunu Fine Art
“My work is often comic and threatening,” Westerlund Roosen said. She has long been drawn to what she calls the grotesque—not as provocation for its own sake, but as a register that allows vulnerability and humor to coexist with force. “I find the grotesque beautiful,” she added.
Westerlund Roosen’s commitment to process was shaped early on by the work of Lynda Benglis, whose poured forms embrace gravity and chance. To Westerlund Roosen, they offered an alternative to Minimalism’s rigid orthodoxies and cold, impersonal finishes. This orientation toward material inquiry has been central to Westerlund Roosen’s practice since the late ’60s when she was just starting out.
Asphalt (1978), for example, doesn’t depict asphalt outright but aims to reconstruct the weightiness of its physical presence. To a 3-foot-by-2.5-foot piece of paper, Westerlund Roosen has added layers upon layers of charcoal, pastel, and oil stick to create an almost all-black surface—flecks of yellow, red, and gray break through the darkness—that looks like a slab of concrete pressed flat. Asphalt isn’t a preparatory study for a sculpture or an illustration of one, but a parallel inquiry that translates the mass and texture of an industrial material into something much more tactile.
Mia Westerlund Roosen, Asphalt, 1978.
Courtesy the artist and Nunu Fine Art
“Then and Now” is Westerlund Roosen’s first exhibition with Nunu Fine Art, which is trying to find a new audience for the artist and reinvigorate her market. Though she has exhibited consistently in New York since the early 1990s, first with Lennon, Weinberg and then Betty Cuningham Gallery (now both defunct), she hasn’t received as much attention as the majority of the other artists included in the “25th Anniversary Exhibition of Leo Castelli.” When asked about the perception that she had been less visible in even the past decade, she pushed back. “I don’t agree with that,” she said. “I’ve worked as much as I ever have with a solo show every two years.” What changed, she argued, was not productivity but attention. “People just stopped paying attention to my work.”
“It’s hard not to admire an artist like Mia, who consistently creates exceptional work and remains deeply committed to her practice,” Hung said. “She is undoubtedly one of the most respected artists of her generation. And yet she does not receive the recognition she deserves, given the quality and scope of her career.”
Mia Westerlund Roosen, Billow, 1983.
Courtesy the artist and Nunu Fine Art
Hung noted that she has priced Heat, the towering sculpture, at $10,000 today, a figure in keeping with where Westerlund Roosen’s market currently is but well below the what a monumental sculpture by male peers of the same period would command. Presenting Westerlund Roosen’s work now, she said, is an effort to recalibrate how it is seen and valued. Hung also plans to introduce the artist’s work to new audiences through her gallery in Taiwan. “I believe Asian collectors will respond to her adventurous spirit and refined craftsmanship,” she said.
But as an artist, Westerlund Roosen is less concerned with her market than what her art can do. “The materials matter,” she said. “Concrete isn’t supposed to be tender, and that’s exactly why I use it. I like pushing something hard into carrying something vulnerable.”
Still, Westerlund Roosen is far from finished. She continues to produce large-scale epoxy sculptures that remain physically demanding and technically complex. If there is a throughline to Westerlund Roosen’s practice, it is her refusal to monumentalize herself. She has never stopped working, never fully exited the conversation, even as attention drifted elsewhere. In an art world calibrated toward immediacy and constant visibility, her work insists on something slower and less legible: duration, touch, and care over time.
“Maybe I’ll get popular when I’m 85, and that’s two years from now,” she said, laughing.
