Finnish Art Now
The prolific Finnish photographer, Elina Brotherus, is possibly our favorite Scandinavian artist at the moment. If you happen to find yourself in New York over the coming months, there’s the chance to see a selection of her work as part of Ars Fennica: Finnish Art Now at Scandinavia House along with the work of three other critically acclaimed artists from Finland: Markus Kåhre, Elina Merenmies, and Anna Tuori.
As for Elina Brotherus, whilst her early works were rooted in the documentary tradition, mainly involving self-portraiture, her more recent work has been dominated by more formal concerns. Despite the fact that her art often provokes conceptual questions, Brotherus insists that her interests are primarily visual rather than theoretical, stating; "I trust my eyes and my intuition".
As Brotherus’s work has evolved, it has become almost devoid of all autobiographical elements but earlier photographs often captured actual events that had occurred in her life. She made ‘Wedding Portraits’ (1997) when she married, ‘Divorce Portrait’ (1998) when she divorced, and ‘I Hate Sex’ (1998) when, as she explained; “I felt that way”. Clearly the connection between art and lived experience is key, as Brotherus explains; “Creating images shakes me up; and when life is ‘shaky’, I get the urge to take photographs”. Take a look below to see a small selection of her work together with more details about Ars Fennica:
Elina Brotherus was born in 1972 in Helsinki, Finland. Before graduating from the University of Art and Design Helsinki in 2000, she studied analytical chemistry at the University of Helsinki, gaining a Master of Science in 1997. She currently lives and works in Helsinki and Paris and has exhibited widely in both group and solo shows internationally. Her works are in public collections across Europe and in private collections in Australia and in the United States. In 2002, she was short-listed for the Carnegie Art Award and for the Citigroup Private Bank Photography Prize.
Edda Jonsdottir, director of i8 Gallery in Reykjavik, once said to Brotherus "Photography is the new painting" and his comments inspired an on-going series by Brotherus called ‘The New Painting’, in which she uses photography to investigate the dilemmas that have challenged painters for centuries: "light, color, composition, figures in space, projection of the three-dimensional into the two-dimensional". Some of her pieces tilt their hat at well-known paintings such as ‘Les Baigneurs’ (The Bathers), 2000 and ‘Femme à sa toilette’ (Woman washing), 2001, and in doing so she places herself firmly in the art-historical tradition.
She continues to combine self-portraiture and landscape work. "When shown together they reflect on each other, and this cross-linking produces new kinds of contents in both genres. The landscapes become charged with meaning, and the self-portraits become more peaceful."
The process of art making is one way in which the artist herself makes sense of the world. "Taking photographs is,’ she says, ‘like naming things, a way of taking control of the world".
Ars Fennica
The Ars Fennica Art Award, which is made annually to one artist in recognition of distinctive artistic output of high merit, is an internationally respected award and the biggest Finnish prize for visual art. It is awarded by The Henna and Pertti Niemistö Ars Fennica Art Foundation, which was set up in 1990 to promote the visual arts, to open up new international contacts for the Finnish art world, and to encourage artists in their creative work.
Ranging from sculpture and installation to painting and photography, the works on view at Scandinavia House provide important insights into the contemporary Finnish art world. Elina Brotherus, Markus Kåhre, Elina Merenmies, and Anna Tuori were finalists for the 2007 Ars Fennica Prize, Finland’s most prestigious visual arts award. The exhibition originated at Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma, Helsinki in the spring of 2007.
Brotherus’s serial photographs of landscapes and figures are like a series of songs or a book of preludes, resisting the temptation to impose a narrative as each image makes the others resonate. Her three-projection video installation, Baigneurs, shows people swimming naked in the sea and the lakes in Finland. The slow movement is cyclical, like waves: the swimmers go in and out of water. The color of water, reflections, and movement play an important role in this silent work.
Kåhre’s installations disorient and disrupt supposedly self-evident assumptions about the ways in which we perceive ourselves in the world, calling into question our ability to see, feel, and understand. The zone of experience that Kåhre has created comes close to that of an experimental theater performance in which spectators find themselves onstage. The aura created by his works, which are all untitled, conjures a lost memory image or a fleeting shadow.
The powerfully symbolic, dreamlike forms in Merenmies’s ink wash works and acrylic and oil paintings evoke trees, faces, and vein networks or nerve pathways. The networks speak of a situation in which the internal structure of the body is delineated for us to see, like a sign of frailty. Grotesque and frightening human figures turn out to be highly nuanced and even amusing. Merenmies’s works are figurative, but the reality that they depict is a mixture of inner visions and multi-threaded stories. They bring order to a convoluted and heterogeneous chaos.
Both beautiful and macabre, Tuori’s darkly warped and joyfully out-of-joint oil paintings reveal the dark side of romanticism. They encompass both agonized ecstasy and violent pleasure as they reject clarity and symmetry in favor of ambivalence and fragmentation. In her contortedly sublime works, there is no hierarchy dividing the representational from the non-representational. At first glance the paintings appear girlish and lighthearted, but upon closer inspection, their idyllic beauty begins to be undermined by various disruptive elements.
Ars Fennica
Ars Fennica: Finnish Art Now
January 30–April 12, 2008
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