GALERIE ANHAVA AT ART HONG KONG:
Contemporary Nordic, stand L01

May 27-30, 2010

With the Nordic theme as a connecting thread at Galerie Anhava’s stand, the audience at Art Hong Kong will have the chance to acquaint themselves with a full range of contemporary Nordic art from painting and sculpture to photography and video, by both emerging and significant artists. We feel that the works chosen for the stand form an interesting and concise presentation with a number of intriguing pairings of works and cross currents from one artist to another.

At Art Hong Kong Galerie Anhava is proud to present the following Nordic artists:

Bård Breivik (Norway)
Anne-Karin Furunes (Norway)
Pertti Kekarainen (Finland)
Matti Kujasalo (Finland)
Marika Mäkelä (Finland)
Jorma Puranen (Finland)
Mari Sunna (Finland)
Santeri Tuori (Finland)

Bård Breivik (born 1948 in Norway) Breivik has moved from silent material and crafts-based objects addressing archetypal forms to computer-assisted sculpture in steel and steel netting. He has worked in all possible materials from bamboo to birch roots, from lianas to copper and from zinc to varnish and wood coated with mother-of-pearl. After all his new experiments, he uncompromisingly applies the craft skills that he learned as a young man and regards it important for the end result to always be perfect. At Art Hong Kong Galerie Anhava would like to present Bård Breivik’s different sized copper sculptures depicting ears.

Norwegian painter Anne-Karin Furunes (born 1961 in Norway) is known for her works employing her specific perforation technique. The works are monochromatic acrylic paintings on canvas, with the image formed by hundreds and thousands of holes of different size. The works are based on photographs according to which Furunes perforates the canvas in a freehand manner. The artist often works with archive photographs, which almost always are of literary content of a political and historical nature. She has found images in archives containing records of persons deported to concentration camps during World War II or those who were subjected to research classifying different types of race. Often she searches for individuals that were not recognised in their own time. The artist’s solo show at the Trondheim Art Museum will open in June 2010.

Pertti Kekarainen's (born 1965 in Finland) works are characterized by the multi-interpretative nature of space. He combines his photographs with local elements of colour that sometimes appear to conform to the space presented in the piece and are sometimes contrary to it. These features create tension and a slightly surreal atmosphere. In terms of atmosphere, these works approach painting, its ability to create illusions of space and visual ambiguity.

Matti Kujasalo (born 1946 in Finland) has been working consistently in concrete art over thirty years. He is one of the most important systematic constructivists in Finland and the only one with a poetic quality. The artist has developed a very specific system yet he continuously finds new areas of freedom within the self-imposed boundaries. With the usual reduction down to few colours Kujasalo achieves a surprising richness of form and variety in his compositions. The works engage the viewer’s gaze and provoke his imagination.

Change is the perennially permanent feature of Marika Mäkelä's (born 1947 in Finland) work. Her paintings sprout ever-new subjects and themes, developing and surprising the viewer. Mäkelä had occasionally painted small works on wood already in the 1980s, but it was not until the first decade of the 21st century that she began to explicitly use layered plywood as a base. Her recent paintings that we will show at Art Hong Kong are executed on wood panel. In these works, the solid feel of material of the varied textures of wood combines with drawing and colours that occasionally appear to be almost immaterially light and occasionally throb with deep tones. The scale of painting is smaller than ever before, resembling tattoos, filigree work or embroidery.

Jorma Puranen’s (born 1951in Finland) is a central figure in Finnish photography. His conceptually intriguing works address the questions of history and representation through innovative visual methods. In his series of works entitled "Icy Prospects", Jorma Puranen paints a piece of wooden board with black, glossy alkyd paint, takes it outdoors and photographs the fragmentary reflection of nature on the surface of the board. The result is a series of extremely painting-like, works, in which the brushstrokes and the uneven features of the board are mixed with the reflected subject. In the series “Shadows, Reflections and All That Sort of Thing” Puranen has captured reflecting light on the surface of old portraits. Faces hide behind reflections that disturb looking at them. As the highlight reveals the wooden texture of the painting or fractures on the surface the viewer becomes aware of time passed. Jorma Puranen’s solo show at EMMA Espoo Museum of Modern Art will open in October 2010.

Mari Sunna’s (born 1972 in Finland) is an exceptionally original painter in a continuous process of renewal. Her works are distinguished by extreme sensitivity, deep feeling and explosive power. She is dealing with emotional states, ways of seeing and the conditions of existence. In her paintings the private becomes public, bridging the most exciting paintings of the present day with the core works of art history that we cannot avoid carrying in our minds. Her paintings are characterized by somnambulant precision and command, ethical purity and innate aesthetic quality.

Santeri Tuori (born 1970 in Finland) has used the combination of photographs and videos, the still and moving image in his intense and intriguing, slightly haunting landscapes and portraits. The works from his latest series “Forest” are a clear continuation of them and have references to many different directions. It is some kind of an attempt to narrow the gap between watching an image of a landscape and being in the landscape. Tuori deals with basic questions of photography and its possibilities to convey its object. Many of the previous works have dealt with photography and the traditions of portraiture. Recent exhibitions by Santeri Tuori include Spiral Wacoal Art Center, Tokyo, EMMA Espoo Museum of Modern Art and and Pro Arte Foundation, St Petersburg.