01 august 2025, Wouter van den Eijkel
The studio of... Jehoshua Rozenman
During the summer, lots of galleries close their doors for a well-earned holiday, but museums stay open, so we're highlighting artists with ongoing museum exhibitions. This time, we talked to Jehoshua Rozenman about the sculptures currently on view at Escher in Het Paleis in The Hague and his working method.
The connections to M.C. Escher’s work may not be immediately obvious, but like Escher, Rozenman uses architecture and like with Escher’s work, you never fully grasp what you're looking at. Rozenman's sculptures have a mysterious quality to them: they may look robust, but are made of glass and like buildings, are unusable. They seem to be referencing modernist architecture with typical stylistic elements, but are non-functional, and look as if they have come from another dimension.
Rozenman has two studios, one in Amsterdam West and one in Prenzlauerberg, Berlin. We spoke with him in his Amsterdam studio, an old ground-floor flat with three kilns in the back room. Rozenman's partner’s career took him to New York and Berlin, where he kept his studio, partly to continue to be inspired by Berlin's history.
The accompanying text for the exhibition Out of the Box is a synopsis of an interview Rozenman gave for German television in which he talks about an old suitcase he found in his studio. The suitcase is filled with drawings from before the Second World War, but also with futuristic and modernist materials and magazines from the 1950s. The interviewer keeps asking whether or not the suitcase is real. Rozenman then admits that he made the whole thing up. Here's the twist: the interviewer doesn’t believe him. Prove it, he says.
When I read this plot twist, I also started doubting the truthfulness of the story. This can’t be real, can it?
My intention is for people to form their own thoughts about my work. The suitcase is a concept, a framework for the exhibition. But yes, for an upcoming exhibition in Berlin, I have to provide statements from everyone I work with, stating that I found the suitcase. It doesn’t matter whether these statements are verifiable—I could pay them to say it—as long as I submit them to the curator. They’re terrified someone might claim the suitcase belonged to their grandfather who was murdered during the Second World War. I’ve never experienced having to prove I invented something before.
Jehoshua Rozenman, Galerie Fontana, Art Rotterdam 2023
The suitcase, the sculptures and other recent work are now on display at Escher in Het Paleis. What inspired the exhibition?
A few years ago at Art Rotterdam, my gallery (Fontana, ed.) partially recreated my studio in their booth. Unlike other booths, theirs was messy. That drew a lot of attention. I was there to explain my work. I talked a lot with students and other visitors. At some point, I noticed someone wanted to talk with me and from the reactions of others, I gathered he was well known. He immediately understood my work and process and asked if I wanted to exhibit “with them”. I told him to talk to my gallery. He then gave me his card and we turned out to be a good match. It was Benno Tempel (then-director of the Kunstmuseum Den Haag, of which Escher in Het Paleis is a part, ed.). I had never met him before. He later left to become director of the Kröller-Müller Museum. But his successor, Margriet Schavemaker, and curator Judith Kadee were just as pleasant to work with.
Did you understand why he asked you to exhibit there of all places?
Yes, I do see the similarities between my work and Escher’s. It looks very different of course, but architecture appears in both our work and you also don’t really know what you’re looking at with my work as well.
How would you describe your work? After all, it’s not traditional glass art.
That’s right. People often don’t know how to categorise me. It’s not typical glass art, but art made of glass. When I lived in New York, a gallery owner once asked me at a dinner, “What kind of art do you make?” I replied, “I make sculptures from glass.” I didn’t see her for the rest of the evening. What I believe is that glass art has a bad reputation, whereas I use glass purely as a material. In my case, people see the sculpture first and only then wonder what it’s made of.
Jehoshua Rozenman, Untitled, 2024, Galerie Fontana
That makes sense. Your glass is often not clear or white, but dark in colour and there are often remnants of the plaster mould on it and you combine it with aluminium, which means that the association with glass isn’t immediate. How would you describe your process?
I make wax models, which I then place in plaster moulds. I steam out the wax, place chunks of glass on top of the mould and when the kiln reaches the right temperature, the glass melts and flows into the mould. The entire process can take several weeks. It takes about five days for the kiln to reach 870 degrees Celsius. It then takes days for the glass to fill all the small channels in the mould and harden. Cooling also takes time—at least two weeks. You can’t just remove the work from the kiln. That would create stress in the glass and might cause it to crack. I’m extremely careful with cooling because if I do it too fast and the work breaks, I lose everything. And the model is gone by that point.
When I look at your work, there’s something intuitive about it. Is this intentional?
When you work on a piece for three or four months, chances are you end up deviating from your drawing or plan along the way. That happens often. I make drawings beforehand, sometimes using AI, but it also happens that I decide to execute it differently. See that drawing there (he points to a large drawing on the back wall of his studio) and you see a tower with a sort of dome like Norman Foster designed for the Reichstag. I ended up leaving that out. It works in the drawing, but not as a sculpture.
Jehoshua Rozenman, Untitled, 2024, Galerie Fontana
You mentioned AI. Your drawings include various stylistic elements and the function of the buildings is sometimes unclear. I can imagine people think your drawings are partly made by AI. Is that true?
I do use AI, but only as an aid. People are often afraid I allow AI to do everything, but I only look to see if it gives usable suggestions. I’ve also had people in the gallery nudge each other and say, “This was made by AI.” That’s not true at all, though I’ve also experienced the opposite.
You’re now 70 and have found your own style and form. What advice would you give to young artists?
Being a young artist doesn't seem to be easy these days. On social media, they see people who are successful, but success says nothing about the quality of the work. It’s also hard to stay successful all the time. That’s why I say to find your own rhythm and your own form. Quality speaks for itself. And then hope it gets recognised and leads to exhibitions.
Jehoshua Rozenman – Out of the Box in Escher in Het Paleis. Photographer: Gerrit Schreurs.
