Robbert Roos started his career as a freelance journalist and art critic for various Dutch dailies and art magazines back in 1989 and made a name for himself as the editor-in-chief of Kunstbeeld. Since 2008, Roos has been the director and curator of Kunsthal KAdE in Amersfoort. An art connoisseur who likes to think outside the box, a quality that makes his exhibitions for Kunsthal KAdE surprising and exciting at the same time. Roos has no trouble putting together a collection for Gallery Viewer, simply because he likes to look at and write about art.
In 2014, as director of the Kunsthal in Amersfoort, he asked dEUS frontman Tom Barman to compile an exhibition on Belgian art. And as the press release said: "The Squarest Rectangle" Tom Barman sees every corner of a century of Belgian art. " In the run-up to the 2020 US presidential elections, Roos went in search of the way artists positioned themselves during the Trump presidency. This led to the three-part exhibition cycle "This Is America | Art USA Today" in which a diverse group of artists creates an image of the current, highly polarized American society through paintings, photography, video, drawings and installations.
For this exhibition, Roos travelled the US for two months talking to artists who honour their president with hyper-realistic paintings, but also with activist artists who are struggling with the humanitarian crisis on the Mexican border and for whom art has become a form of social work. The second instalment of the trilogy, Art Activism in 80s NYC is now on view until 6 September 2020 and part three Being an artist in America will run from 26 September 2020 to 3 January 2021.
"I am fascinated by art that manages to find poetry in an image. And that poetry is often just next to reality. The undercurrent, the transverse view, the indirect truth. Abstraction that takes you away from the concrete. Figuration that escapes literalism. All the artworks I have chosen have something subtle for me. They whisper rather overwhelm one. Often you have to look twice. What is it that I am actually looking at?"