ROSE PROENÇA VAN LENGEN
..born in 1940, in the city of Rio de Janeiro. After a period of work as a journalist, Rose focused almost entirely on a career as an artist. Together with her husband, Johan van Lengen, they moved to San Francisco where she worked with painting, photography and illustration. She participated in expositions around California, New York and Texas. Living in Mexico
(expositions in the Museum Diego Rivera and biennales), she started working with object-art and was part of the feminist art group BioArte.
The vast body of work encompasses traditional crafts of printmaking, painting, photography, mixed media and performance art. Her work reverberates many artistic traditions (e.g tropicália manifestos, the surrealist's movement) of both contemporary and folk art.
To her most notable works belong compositions of over-painted instant photographic images (polaroids). What has been captured as snapshots throughout her life in a diarylike manner, became point of departure for a painterly expression.
The images reproduced here, show a relatively narrow spectre of her work, and are mainly fragments of preliminary and final compositions. Most of the big format works are in private and institutional possessions spread around the world. Many of her paintings and other works are also to be seen here in Tibá.
Each single photo-painting in the polaroid compositions, is partly an objective representation of the world (the photographic print) and partly, an fictional rendering (the painting). Each is a fragment of an entire kaleidoscope of moments, all interweaved into a bigger perspective of a vivid but almost illegible narrative.
The “Masks” series is composed out of trash collected on the streets of New Mexico. The recycling aspect becomes apparent not only by reutilizing the waste, but more importantly, by transforming the fragments of a culture of consumption back into an meaningful whole, native to the culture of tradition.
