Lars van Roosendaal

Biography Lars van Roosendaal

Lars van Roosendaal (* 1977, Leiden, The Netherlands) creates urban sketches, illustrations for magazines, books, posters and music albums as well as art installations in public spaces. He visualizes his ideas with both traditional analog and digital media. His works tell dreamy stories full of bewitched details that invite one to lose oneself in the depictions.

In his youth, Van Roosendaal attends weekly painting and drawing classes. After the Design Academy in Eindhoven, NL, and finishing his training as a graphic designer at the Advertising Academy in Vienna, Van Roosendaal returns to his passion for free visual design on paper and canvas.

The choice of his projects reflects his social and social commitment. From 2009 to 2013, he develops a visual guidance system for Life Ball, the worldwide largest AIDS charity event at Vienna City Hall.

In order to make residents aware of the hidden beauty of their own living environments, Van Roosendaal uses vacant space in Vienna's ground floor zones in 2014 for the project Enchanted Vienna - the urban fairytale path (Wie(n) verzaubert – der Stadtmärchenpfad) The project results in nine fairy-tale installations with dioramas, an animated short film, light installations and improvisation theater, which were shown in 2015 in Reindorfgasse and in 2016/17 in the Freihausviertel in Vienna. TV and radio stations as well as print and online media report on the project, which was awarded the do-it-yourself award.

After making his first attempts at digital illustration and drawing a concept art for a fictitious expansion of Disneyland Paris, Van Roosendaal gradually distances himself from the term commercial artist and embraces his passion for illustrator and artist.

Created on the island of Zakynthos, GR, Van Roosendaal's paintings deal with issues such as existential fears, sexuality and HIV / AIDS. His works show a romantic yearning for the vanishing local in a globalized world and the cohesion of communities.

An important influence, Van Roosendaal calls the fairytale worlds of Anton Pieck in the theme park Efteling, NL and the visual wealth of the hundreds of artists who have worked for The Walt Disney Company over the decades and have materialized their imagination and emotion in narrative images.

During EuroPride Vienna 2019 Van Roosendaal organizes his first solo exhibition in R.O.P.P. in Vienna. The selected pieces display the artists encounters and experiences in the gay scene in Vienna. In his work Van Roosendaal deals with the (in)visibility of the gay meeting places of this city. Whether hidden or open, deliberately closed-off or inviting.

At a group exhibition in June 2019 with the Austrian Queer Art collective Van Roosendaal shows some works in the Fetch Gallery.

In September 2019 Yella Yella Van Roosendaal will dedicate an exhibition to his Urban Sketches on the occasion of the Architecture Day 2019.

Van Roosendaal holds a degree in International Communication Management from the Institute for European Studies in The Hague, NL, and lives and works in Vienna, Austria with his husband Mario Amiro.

Lars van Roosendaal

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