Art 39 Basel

Hreinn Fridfinnsson (born 1943, Iceland) is one of the leading classics of Icelandic conceptual art. Fridfinnsson’s art is both pure – lucidly thought out, scant and even mundane in its themes – as well as lyrical. It is able to evoke strong feelings of wonder, recognition and communality.
Within a few decades Icelandic artists – of whom there are far too many good ones in relation to the population of Iceland – have developed their conceptual art into a genre in its own right. In addition to questions undermining conventional thinking and seeing and the reformulation and rearrangement of the categories of seeing and experiencing which are all characteristic of conceptual art, Icelandic conceptual art is also marked by an extremely refined and usually meagre form: severity and lyricism.

Anne-Karin Furunes (born 1961, Norway) is a Norwegian painter known for her works employing perforation technique. Based on photographs, these pieces have a black or white canvas perforated by the artist in imitation of the screen of a photograph. The landscapes or portraits in her works are based on photographs that the artist discovers while studying in different archives. Furunes’s works are on the one hand paintings dwelling in light, while on the other hand they express the authenticity and intensity of early beautiful monochrome photographs.

Pertti Kekarainen’s (born 1965, Finland) works from the TILA – SPACE series deal in a poetic manner with space, its properties and ambiguity. In their atmosphere, the works approach painting, its ability to create illusions of space and varied visual meanings. They are like contemporary versions of Claude Monet's haystacks or cathedrals. The excellent perception of space makes it easy to understand that Kekarainen was originally trained as a sculptor, now working with the means of photography and painting.

Arno Rafael Minkkinen (born 1945, Finland) is a Finnish-American classic figure of black and white photography. For over thirty years he has been working using his own naked body as means of investigating the relationship we have with nature. Minkkinen is a kind of wizard, whose works are at once witty, profound, humorous and poetic. The richly toned black and white prints are truly surprising, arousing feelings of wonderment and confusion in the viewer.

Marika Mäkelä’s (born 1947, Finland) paintings speak of that which can only be said with the brush of a great painter. Her themes and subjects refer to things of major import, and her manner of painting brings them close, to be comprehended, wandered through with the gaze. She is one of the central figures among the strong female painters of her generation in Finland.