Jani Leinonen
2016
Jani Leinonen
Tony Is Back!
December 2nd – 22nd, 2016
Zetterberg Gallery
Tony is Back! presents Jani Leinonen’s first video works consisting of a series of commercial-like videos with Kellogg’s iconic cereal mascot, Tony the Tiger navigating a grown-up world of prostitution, police violence and suicide bombers. The exhibition also explores the structures and power of the commercial world through an exceptional series of Leinonen’s sign works from 2011 – 2015.
Sampsa
2016
May 21 – June 8, 2016
Zetterberg Gallery
Jani Leinonen, Jiri Geller, Aurora Reinhard, Mari Keto, Sampsa, Joonas Kota
2016
January 29 – March 13, 2016
Zetterberg Gallery
Jani Leinonen, Jiri Geller, Aurora Reinhard, Mari Keto, Sampsa, Joonas Kota
“None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free”
– Goethe
Jiri Geller & Kaos
2015
Jiri Geller and Kaos
Zetterberg Gallery
June 14 – July 26, 2015
Jiri Geller and graffiti artist Kaos Bang! combines danger, beauty and lightness in an explosive exhibition, where the contradiction between Geller’s perfectly manufactured and polished surfaces and Kaos rougher expression creates a flaming cocktail.
Jani Leinonen
2015
Jani Leinonen
Sacrifices
March 14 – May 3, 2015
Q: What do you think is the most surprising thing about humanity?
A: Man. Because he sacrifices his health in order to make money. Then he sacrifices money to recuperate his health. And then he is so anxious about the future that he does not enjoy the present, the result being that he does not live in the present or the future, he lives as he is never going to die, and then dies having never really lived.
Leinonen’s Sacrifices is forcing us to think about what we really are willing to sacrifice?
Jani Leinonen, Aurora Reinhard
& Jiri Geller
2014
Jani Leinonen, Aurora Reinhard & Jiri Geller
Zetterberg Gallery
May 25 – September 21, 2014
Zetterberg Gallery is proud to present the most recent works by Jani Leinonen, Aurora Reinhard and Jiri Geller in the up coming exhibition This Is The Way.
The exhibition brings together works by Leinonen, Reinhard and Geller combining commercial culture and critical perspective with highly demanding craftsmanship and flawless aesthetics.
Mari Keto
2013
Mari Keto – Delirium
Zetterberg Gallery
November 17 – December 15, 2013
The exhibition Delirium presents for the first time a complete overview of Mari Keto’s work; the portrait series of spectacular pop icons in colourful rhinestones, the hunting trophy works and the micro worlds of the dioramas inhabited by skeletal angels, fairies and mermaids in precious metals.
The exhibition title Delirium refers to a condition where one loses ones grip of the world, a dizzying slip of meaning rendering it impossible to distinguish between real and unreal, fact and fiction. Two central themes run through Keto’s art, the glittering surfaces of temporary pop mythology and the hunt; death rearing its head almost everywhere.
With her images of pop icons Keto is looking into the core of our culture’s obsession with celebrity. We see fame emerging as a thing in itself. The insistent faces have a power, a vector that captures something essential in the celebrity fixation of our time.
The undecidability of who is cheating who is the ambiguous position established by the works in the series called Fashion Victims. The relationship between hunter, victim and trophy is unclear. We buy brand value and invest it in ourselves fully aware of the price. Luxury is a trap that we gladly step into. We even skin ourselves to afford to do so.
Trophies are in their nature aestheticized death. Death is most clearly manifest in Keto’s works with skeletons of mythological and fantastic creatures. In small cabinets of curiosities the little creatures have been locked up and left to die. Did we forget them? Did we lose faith? Or did we trap and kill them with our logic and science? A contemporary disenchantment has taken place with fatal consequences.
Keto’s works balances both references to the tradition of memento mori going back to the Middle Ages as well as references to pop art of the 60’s and 70’s. Keto’s works are often inscribed narratives structured by symbolic elements. The Modern images of vanities seem to suggest that celebrity is the folklore of our time.
Keto’s classical training as a jewellery artist is apparent in her use of materials and in the extreme precision of their execution. The perfect finish imbues the stories of the works with gravity. The materials are often in themselves laden with meaning.
The Oxford Dictionary defines delirium as “an acutely disturbed state of mind characterised by restlessness, illusions, and incoherence”, this is what Keto’s works seem to point to in our world. The dictionary also holds a second meaning for the word delirium as “a state of wild excitement or ecstasy”. It is this second meaning that radiates from Keto’s sparkling and glitteringly perfect works.
Mari Keto’s portrait of Her Majesty The Queen Margrethe II of Denmark, ordered by the Danish Royal Collection will also be displayed at the exhibition.
Text: Magnus Kaslov
Jani Leinonen & Aurora Reinhard
2013
New works by Jani Leinonen and Aurora Reinhard
Zetterberg Gallery
September 14 – November 3, 2013
Jani Leinonen
2013
Assassination – Bullet Works by Jani Leinonen
Zetterberg Gallery
May 25 – August 10, 2013
Sometimes violence is arbitrary, sometimes structured. And ever more often, it’s entertainment. In his Bullet Works Leinonen has replaced his brush with a gun. He has shot through framed laminated glass with tens of different guns and different calibers from 22 to 500: handguns, assault rifles, automatic weapons, shotguns; Desert Eagle, Walther PPK, Streetsweeper (buckshot), 45 Colt, M4, .500 S&W Magnum; using each gun model only once. There is a contradiction between the snowflake-like beauty of the bullet hole and the lethal force of the AK-47 that made it.
Assassination is an exhibition that shows one line of the three series of Bullet Works: the other lines are Monochromes and Painted Bullet Holes.
The origin of the word “assassins” (Arabic: Hashshashin) traces back to before the first Crusade around 1080. Assassins is a misnomer for the Nizari Ismailis brotherhood, who found themselves not only fighting for power against other Muslims, but also against Christian invaders. Since the Crusades the term assassin has been used to describe a hired professional killer or a cutthroat. Assassination (French: assassin) denotes any action involving murder of the target for political reasons.
Jani Leinonen’s starting point for the Assassination / Bullet Works leads us to Andy Warhol, who was shot at his studio. After Warhol got out of hospital, he found that one of his prints had also been pierced by a bullet that had first gone through his body. Bullet, Body, Brutality, Art!
Leinonen’s Bullet Works are some of the most violent works in the history of modern and contemporary art. The series is both conceptually and physically comparable to Picasso’s Guernica, the Spatial Concept / Slash Series “cutthroat” works of Lucio Fontana, the Fire Paintings by Yves Klein, the building cuts house installations by Gordon Matta-Clark, the Ambulance Disaster by Andy Warhol, or Robert Longo’s Men in the Cities – a monumental series of drawings of a man shot in his back and sharply dressed men writhing in contorted emotion.
In the Assassinations series Leinonen has shot at commercial cereal characters like Tony the Tiger, Cornelius, Cap’n Crunch and Snap, Crackle and Pops. When looking at the assassinated figures, which represent the Big Business of industrial food, GMO, health and obesity problems etc., we begin to feel sympathetic and protective about the fictitious characters – we might even feel morally offended by the violent act. Only because the marketing of these friendly characters has been managed in order that it touch our feelings. They have a place in our hearts. We are the ones who have been shot!
Leinonen shows in a very simple way how entertainment and advertising techniques – insane capitalism – distance us from the real.
– Eeropekka Rislakki