Anton Rooskens artwork • painting • previously for sale Figure with birds
Anton Rooskens
Horst 1906-1976 Amsterdam
1906-1976
Figure with birds
oil on canvas 81.2 x 100.0 cm, signed l.r. and dated '71
This painting was previously for sale.
Anton Rooskens had been working as an artist for some time when, in 1945, he made a radical turnabout and began working in a free, unfettered idiom. This led to him to joining the Netherlands Experimental Group and then the Cobra artists. Rooskens drew inspiration for his abstract expressionist pictures from ‘primitive’ African and pre-Columbian art, which had been discovered by many artists after the war. Thus, idols, masks, shields and typical African ornament can be found in nearly all his works of the forties and fifties, which are also dominated by a lively interplay of lines and liberal use of black.