| 10. 12. 2005 - 8. 1. 2006 | Mari Sunna |
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Intermission |
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) Untitled ) Nukke ) Ghosts ) Princess ) Dilemma ) La Dance ) Model ) I Am Are ) Mother ) Orfeus ) Oidipus ) Cloud ) Excluded ) Untitled ) Capture ) Trance ) Black Out ) Open Up Cut ) Lock ) Untitled ) Again ) Between ) Triple ) Naisen Pää ) Happines ) Aino ) Nostalgia
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"Imagine a mirror in which the reflections have remained after those that stood before them have moved on; imagine that those reflections will disintegrate some day and their unattached members will form strange figures in the mirror and that those strange figures will in turn unravel and their different, borrowed members will return to the bodies to which they once belonged; you will then have an image of the brain, of the meanderings of reason and its recovery in our imagination."
Joseph Joubert Mari Sunna (born 1972) is a young artist who has lived in London since 1999 and whose paintings have aroused a great deal of attention ever since her first showings. Of all the painters that I have presented at international art fairs, she has definitely been the most successful one. Her works are currently in public and private collections in Finland, in the Saatchi and Deutsche Bank collections among others, and in countless private collections abroad. Sunna is an exceptionally original painter in a continuous process of renewal, whose works are distinguished by extreme sensitivity, deep feeling and explosive power. From her early existentialist works of faceless girls she has moved on to addressing emotional states, ways of seeing and the conditions of existence. In her paintings, private becomes public, establishing a bridge between the most exciting contemporary paintings and the masterpieces of the art history that we cannot avoid carrying in our minds. Mari Sunna's paintings are not pleasant, nor do they seek to be, any more than Francis Bacon's, Goya's or El Greco's paintings of human angst, struggle and the search for the self try to be pleasant. Like truly fine paintings that were once new, they can appear to be strange or even abhorrent. This abhorrence is broken down, or expiated, by the somnambulant precision and command, ethical purity and innate aesthetic quality of her works. Ilona Anhava |