This portrait of Roxana Rozenblad is my contribution to ARTI 2.020 Summer Salon. I made it last September, during my artist residency in Paramaribo. Roxana studied at Nola Hatterman Art Academy and now works at the Craft Market, where she makes and sells, among other things, festive indigenous clothing. She also sells her own drawings and paintings, I bought a small pen drawing from her.
The portrait has first been exhibited in Readytex Art Gallery at the duo exhibition Bezielde lijnen / Soulful lines with Rinaldo Klas. What I find special about this story is that I met Rinaldo Klas for the first time, eleven years ago, when he was the director of the same Nola Hatterman Academy. We became friends, kept in touch all the time and recently have been working together in Suriname. Moreover, soon here too, Rinaldo Klas, Moritz Ebinger and me are going to do be working together at BIJLMAIR, the CBK Zuidoost artist residency, while at the Stedelijk (Amsterdam museum of modern art) people are working hard on the exhibition Surinamese School with, naturally, work by Nola Hatterman herself, her students (Rinaldo Klas being one of them) and the students of her students …
Maartje Jaquet 