LONDON.- VeneKlasen, London is presenting Ce Roser: Running with the Sun, Works 1961–2014, an exhibition of paintings and works on paper by the centenarian, New York-based artist (b. 1925, Philadelphia). Running with the Sun is Roser’s first solo exhibition outside the United States in over six decades, and her first in Europe, tracing her remarkable contribution to the language of abstract painting over more than five decades.

The exhibition brings together works that exemplify the distinctive visual vocabulary Roser began to develop after settling in New York in the 1950s. By then, she had lived across Asia and Europe—spending formative years in China, India, Pakistan, Thailand and the Philippines, before studying in Berlin at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste under Hans Uhlmann several years after the Second World War. These unusually expansive cultural and artistic experiences became the foundation of a painterly practice that feels at once contemporary and timeless, a synthesis of diverse visual traditions that forms a language entirely the artist's own.

Roser's paintings are built from a combination of perception and invention. Radiant bursts of colour define her early works of the 1960s, rendering memories of her travels or moments of spectacle observed from the window of her studio on the Upper West Side, a space she has maintained for over seventy years. Since 1970, Roser has cultivated a sparer style, characterised by the interplay of stark, white space (a translation of her impression of the sunlight on the Hudson River) and vibrant, sweeping bands of colour. Roser recognises the deep impact of encounters with older artists in New York during this period, particularly the unconventional work of American artists Charmion von Wiegand and Sari Dienes, and her studies of Chinese ink painting with the legendary Japanese calligrapher Hidai Nankoku. Firmly rooted in the spirit of postwar American abstraction, her work draws on a rich, cross-cultural visual vocabulary, expanding the possibilities of abstraction in both the mid-twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

As committed as Roser is to painting, an equally defining facet of her career is her role as one of the pioneering feminist activists in the American art world. Together with Cynthia Navaretta, she co-founded the Women in the Arts Foundation WIA in 1971, an organisation dedicated to advancing the representation of women artists in museums that remains active today. Alongside artists including Louise Bourgeois, Elaine de Kooning, Lee Krasner, Joan Mitchell, and Alice Neel, Roser organised protests outside New York's leading institutions, including the Guggenheim, the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art. The efforts of Roser and her fellow activists contributed to landmark exhibitions dedicated to women artists, including Women Choose Women at the New York Cultural Center and Women Artists: Works on Paper at the Brooklyn Museum, both of which included Roser's own work.

Works by Ce Roser are held in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Philadelphia Museum of Art; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, among others. Her archives are held in the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.