Lars Göran Johnsson has collected art for nearly 70 years. His journey of exploration that began with a yearning for beauty has resulted in the creation of one of the foremost private art collections in Finland. The multi-faceted collection reflects its creator’s mobile lifestyle and interest in current affairs. Johnsson donated the collection to Turku Art Museum in 2016, and it has continued to grow since then. Filling the galleries on both floors of the art museum, the exhibition opens up vistas onto international modernism and contemporary art.
The collection includes works by Jiri Geller, Mari Keto and Riikka Hyvönen amongst others.
Anomalies (Tropical cyclone), 2019 / oil on canvas / 60 cm (d)
Anomalies (Gale), 2019 / oil on canvas / 60 cm (d)
Anomalies (Thunderstorm), 2019 / oil on canvas / 60 cm (d)
Anomalies (Typhoon), 2019 / oil on canvas / 90 cm (d)
Anomalies (Firestorm), 2019 / oil on canvas / 90 cm (d)
Anomalies (Derecho), 2019 / oil on canvas / 60 cm (d)
Zetterberg Gallery is pleased to present Joonas Kota’s third solo show at the gallery with the exhibition Anomalies. With painting as his main medium, Joonas Kota (b. 1976) is distinguished for his meticulous work and attention to detail. Kota’s works, all borderline between abstract and figurative, often creates parallel realities and drifts between the fragility of the momentary and timelessness. Kota graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Helsinki in 2003 and is represented in both private and public collections, including KiasmaMuseum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki Art Museum – HAM and E.W. Ponkala Foundation’s collection. The artist lives and works in Helsinki.
Always a Storm Away // Joonas Kota Text by Aura Seikkula
As a focal, metaphysical idea of human knowledge, transcendence implies a new, third meaning. The actual possibility of knowing, and retroactively knowing if one knew. Jean-Paul Sartre’s positioning gains meaning in an object-oriented world. In Being and Nothingness (1943/1956) Sartre states “Consciousness is a being such that in its being, its being is in question insofar as this being implies a being other than itself.” This itself, the consideration of its being, has brought meaning to Joonas Kota’s artistic practice.
Kota’s oeuvre revolves around three elements: the symbolic reality, the reality in itself and the transcendental. Here, as for Sartre, the transcendental third element is the actual meaning creating agency. In his earlier works, Kota proposed how an abstracted forest turns into a virtual scape, how a diamond reflects fractions of the world around us and how an Emoji icon has gained symbolic meaning even outside its original context. Interestingly, with these elements, Kota pays tribute to the meaning of motifs in painting, by carefully elaborating on each for each series.
Kota’s Transcendent Diamonds series is such a three-tier consideration of the invaluable jewel. In his latest exhibition series, Kota continues to develop his fascination for this symmetric structure and in its seemingly metaphoric meaning, he defines the actual objective phenomena of the natural world. Fascination with this ultimate natural item is intelligible. A diamond is immune to any impurity due to the arrangement of atoms that are extremely rigid. It is also a semiconductor that displays the highest known thermal conductivity and electron saturation velocity of all earthly materials. Regardless of these facts, the question keeps being directed to human time. Can something be eternal in the world we have created temporal? Kota’s answer is transcendental.
The continuum of our efforts is fragmented. The continuum of our efforts gain an entity only when considered retroactively. So, it is in this process Kota partakes in the continuum of landscape painting by bringing forth one of the most beloved motifs, the storm. Once hated by its contemporaries the Turnerian stormy sea is a meaningful reference, maybe even more so in the era of the climate crisis. For Turner, the sea always set the stage for a tragedy. It was threatening, depicting Nature’s venom in the loss of man’s nullity.
Keeping in mind with Turnerian understanding, each of Kota’s diamonds entails a storm. The meticulously shaped structures have an enchanting draw. The framed, round shape becomes a telescope for terrestrial observation. Here again, Kota’s transcendental consideration gains depth as he acknowledges the overwhelming objectivity of nature. By layering natural phenomenon with scenery and simultaneously arranging our vision with formed regularities of a cubic crystal system, the diamond, Kota proposes a stance for all life forms.
Aurora Reinhard is included in the exhibition Inspiration – Iconic works presenting contemporary art side by side with classical works at Nationalmuseum, Stockholm. The exhibition is on display from February 20 to May 17, 2020, after which it will continue to Ateneum in Helsinki through June 18 to September 20, 2020.
How have international contemporary artists been inspired by the classics of European art? And why is it these works, in particular, that have become known around the world? Inspiration presents art that draws inspiration from iconic masterpieces, created by today’s most interesting contemporary artists. In the exhibition, the original works are referenced, for example, through replicas, prints, plaster casts, and abundant archive materials.
The chief curators for both exhibitions are the director-general of Nationalmuseum in Sweden, Susanna Pettersson, and the London art historian James Putnam. Co-curators for the Ateneum exhibition will be the museum director Marja Sakari and the chief curator Sointu Fritze.
For Susan Sontag art has the capacity to make us anxious and uncomfortable, as such. For Sontag, art is inviting us to engage in a private, sensual experience through an interpretative dialogue. Art asks for our intellect to interpret, to prove our potential to think and to create meaning. However, we should find a balance in this task. A balance with content and concept without overdoing it. This act of interpreting art is an intellectual task, that is loaded with consciousness and appreciation, simultaneously accepting the volume of the artistic process and its results. As Sontag notes, art aims to seduce us with this engagement, not to rape our consciousness.
Riikka Hyvönen is on an exploration of beauty with her expressive and thought-provoking acts of the construction of contemporary identity and the nature of its various representations. Hyvönen has built the foundation of her practice on the forms of objectification through which the female body is dismantled and constructed online and in print.
Questions of representation and objectification gain duality in her work. Hyvönen considers self-identity as a constructed mass deception that we have agreed upon. Her witty, playful and controversial work is both founded in the present while she extends commercial values in visuality to reconsider common female stereotypes and cultural assumptions on beauty. Her famous Roller Derby Kisses sculptural painting series portrayed the achievements through the intimacy of female skin and there captured the massive, momentary marks that gain new importance only inside a small group of enthusiasts. Proceeding from this consideration of personalized beauty, she looks at the objectifying process of editorial shoots. In her recent photo installations series, her content and concept were built from the fashion magazines editorial photoshopping. Here the models’ faults, the photoshopped ones, are highlighted on plexiglass duplicating the original photo of the model. Hanging large-scale and heavy the pieces scrutinize our conception on digitally constructed beauty.
Having her interests stemming from pop culture and aesthetics, Hyvönen’s insightful criticism reaches beyond prevailing questions of body image and feminism. She attests the ways in which popular gestures end up as mechanisms of cultural consolidation. And as requested by Sontag, she lets us find these meanings by engaging with her proposal.
Hyvönen continues merging sculptural elements in her painting process. This time by turning her painterly gaze to the natural world. With the exhibited series she captures the momentary joy of light erupting on a surface, touching it with a prism. She finds her references from social media to employ a selection of experiences. For Hyvönen, light’s metaphors are a multitude. Whereas the spectrum can form upon a heavily bruised skin, as in Roller Derby Kisses, Hyvönen is aware of the weight of its connotations. Can you paint a rainbow without touching upon – any of – its denotations? Regardless, one is clear. Light can break though anything. Even the darkest of the hour.
[1]Susan Sontag Against Interpretation, 1966 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Riikka Hyvönen (b. 1982 Rovaniemi, Finland) lives and works in London. Hyvönen holds a BA of Fine Arts from Goldsmiths, University of London and is currently finishing her master’s studies at the Academy of Fine Arts in Helsinki.
The Summer show 2019 at Zetterberg Gallery brings together works by Jani Leinonen, Aurora Reinhard, Jiri Geller, Riikka Hyvönen, Joonas Kota & Mari Keto.
Jani Leinonen’s new stained glass paintings have found a worthy new home at the Dolder Grand Hotel in Zurich, Switzerland.
The installation named “Chapel of Remorse” was originally installed in a 500-year-old barn in the small village of Madulain, in the valley of Engadin, Switzerland, where the glass panels were cut to fit perfectly in the centuries-old window frames.
The glass panels of the Chapel of Remorse are painted with old stained glass technique at Mayer’sche Hofkunstanstalt in Münich.
What is now installed on the Grand Dolder’s wall is not only the stained glass artworks but also the centuries-old chapel-like architectural composition and shapes of the windows of a medieval Swiss barn.
Given the stained-glass technique’s association with religion, Leinonen’s work does convey a sense of divinity. But the work feels no more like a house of God than it does a place of worship to the light, nature or humanity – in all their colorful forms – in good and bad.
The Ars Fennica 2019 exhibition, presenting works by the five candidates for Finland’s most notable visual art award, is now open at the Amos Rex museum. The nominees are Petri Ala-Maunus (FI), Miriam Bäckström(SE), Ragnar Kjartansson (IS), Egill Sæbjörnsson (IS) and Aurora Reinhard(FI). The Ars Fennica 2019 Award, is granted by the Henna and Pertti Niemistö Art Foundation to a visual artist in recognition of distinctive artistic work of high merit and includes a monetary prize of 40,000 euros. The winner of the 2019 award will be announced on August 21st by Roland Wetzel, Director of Tinguely Museum in Basel, Switzerland.
The exhibition is open from June 19–September 9, 2019.
Jani Leinonen is included in the new collection display at the Art Museum Gösta Manor presenting classics owned by the Gösta Serlachius Fine Arts Foundation, of the Golden Age of Finnish and old European art as well as more recent acquisitions.
The summer 2019 hanging includes, among other works, Albert Edelfelt’s much-loved Finnish Soldiers in War of 1808–09 and a number of Helene Schjerfbeck paintings. The exhibition is curated by Veikko Halmetoja.
Gösta Serlachius Fine Arts Foundation’s collection includes Finnish art classics and old European paintings and is is one of the grandest private art collections in Scandinavia.
Finnish artist Jani Leinonen received unexpected worldwide attention earlier this year as his sculpture, depicting a crucified McDonald sparked violent protests outside the Haifa Museum of Art in Israel on January 14th.
The sculpture, called “McJesus,” was included in an exhibition called Sacred Goods, that was meant to be a critique of society’s capitalistic culture. The sculpture had been up already since August 2018 and shown in other countries without any incidents. Violent clashes broke out between Christian protesters and the police, after a molotov cocktail was thrown at the museum and the protesters tried to storm their way in to remove the work.
The Sacred Goods exhibition, which focuses on contemporary artists’ responses to issues of religion and faith in consumer society, also featured other provocative works depicting Jesus and the Virgin Mary as Ken and Barbie dolls.
The Israeli Culture Minister Miri Regev demanded censorship of the sculpture and threatened to cut state funds for the museum, however the Israel’s justice ministry argued she has no such authority.
The museum told the Times of Israel that it condemned the violence that broke out in protest of the sculpture.
“A discourse about art, however complex it may be, must not spill over into violent territory and must be respected — even in charged situations,” the museum’s director Nissim Tal said.
Eventually, the Haifa Museum was forced to remove the sculpture before the end of the exhibition, whereas no other works considered provocative were removed.
