Exhibitions

ENGAGING IN NOTIONS OF BEAUTY // RIIKKA HYVÖNEN

Art is Seduction – Not rape 

Susan Sontag, 1966[1]

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.

Text by Aura Seikkula

SUMMER 2019

The Summer show 2019 at Zetterberg Gallery brings together works by Jani Leinonen, Aurora Reinhard, Jiri Geller, Riikka Hyvönen, Joonas Kota & Mari Keto.

The exhibition runs through June – August 2019.

Jani Leinonen
If these are our heroes who needs enemies
January 18–February 10, 2019

Zetterberg Gallery is pleased to open the exhibition programme of 2019 with Jani Leinonen’s solo ´If these are our heroes who needs enemies´  on January 18th.

Leinonen’s exhibition questions why certain hero-statues still stand in the centers of the European capitals, and why so many do not know – or if they know – subvert – the unspeakable atrocities of some of these historical figures?

The works in Jani Leinonen’s exhibition consist of about two hundred scattered hero statues of different sizes. There are more than 160 sculptures in the main work of the exhibition – even some Finnish heroes fit in.

Leinonen’s exhibition draws our attention to the collective loss of memory that those heroic descriptions maintain: they wipe out the shocking acts of the rulers of history and replace them with sacrificial heroism, romantic adventures, and noble generosity. The exhibition speaks of unobtrusive but effective ways of building and maintaining social power – also through art.

Joonas Kota: #PARTYPOPPER

November 30–December 16, 2018

Excerpts from Dr. Sam Inkinen’s essay “A Dialogue at the Studio, or Observations on Art and the Artist – Postmodern, Metamodern, and the Internet Zeitgeist as Key Themes”(November 2018)

Aurora Reinhard is known for her photographs, sculptures and videos often dealing with themes of gender and sexuality, moving between documentary and surreal approaches. For her latest body of work Broken, the artist has sought inspiration in the everlasting myths and art history of Western imagery while contemplating her dual role as the artist’s muse and the heroic creator of art.

Jiri Geller
BACK IN BLACK
October 5-21, 2018

Works by Jiri Geller, Joonas Kota, Jani Leinonen and Aurora Reinhard.
June 29–September 16, 2018.

Leinonen’s latest body of work seeks inspiration in euphemisms and the exhibition presents new large-scale flower paintings where real flowers merge with plastic evergreens, as well as collages of the artist’s distinguished cereal box works.

”I want to make art that is at once timeless and topical”

The expression of a Smiley is a broad smile always expressing the same overwhelming enthusiasm. A Smiley face expresses joy, encouragement, approval. It symbolises everything positive, although when simplified, the message functions mostly as an encouraging punctuation mark – as such, it is simultaneously the most pointless and the most meaningful in the world.

The three-dimensional, cast-aluminium sculptures of Jiri Geller’s new series have been inspired by the classic Smiley face. Geller continues to present detailed, expertly-crafted sculptures by offering yet another perspective into his conceptual nihilism. The sculptures’ pattern of events that appears to have halted for a fraction of a second is known from Geller’s previous work, and the latest series of works is no exception; the hyper-finalised forms of the sculptures stretch, empty, bubble, splash, move mechanically, and the smiley face gets an ice-cream cone in the eye.

Smiley usage is global, it is a cross-cultural image whose positive message has lived on in different forms, from cave paintings to today’s smart phones. Geller’s sculptures do not, however, depict the smileys that have evolved into emojis, although their ubiquitous presence has played a part in the birth of the work. In written sources, the first symbol interpretable as a smiley can be found already in the 1600s. From then on, different versions are occasionally observed in different sources, although increasingly from the mid-1900s onwards. The classic yellow Smiley face, made famous by popular culture, is based on a symbol developed in the US in 1963, with the aim of encouraging improved achievement among employees of a life-insurance company. This has become part of the standards of today’s working life; employees are given warnings ever more lightly, if they don’t remember to smile enough.

“Remember to smile, it’s nice to look at a smiley face!”

Geller’s chosen topics often consist of objects or situations based on something that has become iconic. Geller sees Smiley as an example of this. Like balloons, skulls, or escalators, they are not located in time, but are simultaneously both topical and timeless.

Jiri Geller (born 1970, resides and works in Helsinki) is known for his highly detailed sculptures that utilise current phenomena in pop culture. Geller has held several notable solo exhibitions around Finland and the Nordic countries, as well as taken part in numerous exhibitions in international art institutions around the world.