Erik Karel Roos was born in Padang, Indonesia in 1938. He moved to the Netherlands and studied at the prestigious Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam before spending the formative years of his career in Florence, Italy, where he lived and worked from 1962 until 1978. That long Italian immersion left a deep mark on his art — in his preoccupation with walls, architectural surfaces, and the textures of ancient urban structures that would become the defining subject matter of his work.
Roos was a sculptor, painter, and graphic artist of considerable technical originality. His most celebrated works are built from incredibly dense, vibrant surfaces created through fine, repetitive vertical lines in coloured pencil — a painstaking technique that produces textures of extraordinary richness and depth. His key series — Albigesi, Muro (Wall), and Progetto per un Muro — return again and again to the wall as subject: not merely as architectural form but as a record of time, weather, and human presence, abstracted into something meditative and quietly monumental.
His prints produced in collaboration with Fred Genis at the Oudkerk workshop in Friesland bring this same sensibility to the lithographic medium — non-figurative geometric compositions of meticulous precision that reward close and patient looking.
Roos was a close friend of celebrated Dutch designer Benno Premsela, who actively preserved and promoted his legacy after his death. His work is held in the permanent collection of Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam.
Erik Roos died in Amsterdam in 1994.
