Galerie Anhava

A relationship with everyday life is one of the pillars of Dahlgren’s practice where he constantly seeks geometric and abstract patterns in the surrounding world and processes the mundane and quotidian into art. The title, Units of Measurements, refers to a series of works where Dahlgren uses folding rulers to make rigorous arrangements on the wall, creating, minimalist and multicoloured pictorial patterns. 

The exhibition runs through 29 January 2022.

Image: Units of Measurements, folding rulers, 232 x 400 cm

The Cholmondeley Ladies borrows its title from one of Britain’s most famous paintings – although its author remains a mystery – depicting two nearly-identical twins holding equally-alike babies. This notion of repetition acts as a guiding principle to the show.  Hellberg exhibits works that, though essentially individual pieces, communicate through the repetition of hues and signs, blending notions of foreground and background in her signature fantastic-realist style.

Image: Snakes Come Out in the Rain, 2021, mixed media on canvas, 150 x 150 cm

For Facing Life 25 young people aged 15–20 were invited to curate and deliver a new exhibition based on the Niemistö contemporary art collection. The young curatorial team assumed full creative control over the exhibition’s themes, content, display design and wider visual identity. The exhibition explores a series of themes that speak directly to young people, including identity, equality, mental health and social pressures. 

The exhibition runs until 16 October 2022.

Image: Figure on a Chair, 2017, oil on canvas, 200 x 149 cm

Diversity United sheds light on themes such as freedom and democracy, migration and territory, political and personal identity, utopias and fears, which also revolve around the current pandemic. The exhibition reflects the complexity of the European idea and its social realities in a globalized world, underlining the value of cross-cultural conversation.

Image: Marko Vuokola, Flora (Sharpen), 2012, diptych, diasec 2x 100 x 100 cm

The Meditative Clock is a series of hourglass-like glass sculptures in which sand of different colors measures its own time. Instead of experiencing impatience or the ruthlessness of time, in Aho’s work the passage of time seems soothing. The placement of the work in a learning environment concretizes the significance of the school path and the stages of human life from preschool to adulthood. The sand flowing inside the sculptures reminds us that learning is a lifelong process in which every grain of knowledge increases our understanding of the world.

Photo: Jussi Virkkumaa / State Art Commission

Now, a selection of available works by our represented artists can be found from each of the Artist pages, via a new Available works button. To our About us menu we have added information regarding e.g. accessibility. In addition to English, the exhibition texts are from now on available both in Finnish and Swedish.

We hope this makes your visit to the website and the gallery even more pleasant and finding the right information easier. The gallery team is happy to assist with any questions and inquiries regarding, for instance, aquiring an art work – from finding the right piece to shipment and installing – or curatorial collaborations.

https://anhava.com

Fridfinnsson’s art is often recursive and contingent, casting a wide net of references, often to others of the artist’s works. The works aligne with contemporaneous cutting-edge art movements, such as land art and photoconceptualism, but still suggest the distinctively romantic, lyrical, and wry sensibility.

Watch the artist look back on his practice and on specific works that embody his distinctive world view in the video.

Image: Hreinn Fridfinnsson, For the Time Being, exhibition view. Photo: Courtesy of MDC

“[L]ike the new building and the university itself, an oak tree creates an elevated and bright environment around it and provides a habitat for numerous species”, Schroderus says.

The sculpture was chosen as the winner of the art competition organized by the State Art Commission in co-operation with Suomen Yliopistokiinteistöt Oy, Åbo Akademi and the University of Turku.

Photo: Noora Schroderus

ARS22 features some of the most compelling contemporary artists and art, and for the first time, the show will also include key works from the past decades. The aim is to create a space of encounters, empathy, shared experiences and community, and raise questions about the environment, economy and technology. The exhibition is the first to be shown at the newly renovated museum building. 

Photo: Petri Summanen

The Touch is a permanent exhibition presenting works from the Saastamoinen Foundation Collection, and combining Finnish and international art from different eras. The display is periodically refreshed with thematic ensembles offering a variety of perspectives on the human condition and life’s biggest questions. The new section, curated around a painting by Juhani Linnovaara, Listening to Silence (1955), explores inner worlds, whether through people processing past events or traumas, or the joy of play.

Photo: Karoliina Hellberg, Wrapped, 2019, acryl and oil on canvas, 220 x 148 cm, Saastamoinen Foundation Collection. | Photo: Jussi Tiainen

The exhibition features a wide-ranging offering of contemporary art, including photography and videography, installation, sculpture and rya rug, from 16 artists. The artworks deal with the diversity of gender and sexuality, identity development and experiences with discrimination, but also liberation, pleasure, intimacy and caring. With Spectrum, the museum is taking a stand on equality and introducing new voices. The exhibition, running through 9 January 2022, is arranged in co-operation with the artists, experience experts and associations.

Image: Noora Schroderus, Nauhahiomakone, 2006, fabric, cotton wool, stainless steel

“A repeating theme in Anne-Karin Furunes’ art is that of the female character victim to historic events beyond her control. She uses different archives to search for pictures that move her. These small photographs, originally taken for bureaucratic purposes, are enlarged into paintings often over two metres in height. What she discovers in the archives are the human beings behind the historical destinies that they have been subjected to.”

“The technique that Anne-Karin Furunes uses is based on piercing holes of various sizes into canvas or paper by hand. (…) She has developed this technique for about three decades and today masters it to the minutest detail. (…) The picture becomes an event, a moment of communication between the eyes of the portrayed person and the viewer. The layers of historical events disappear as we face the gaze of another human being.”
– Maaretta Jaukkuri

Photo: Petra Kotro

Ink Dreams explores how this spirit of ink translates to other mediums, global makers, and contemporary times. Comprising works of photography, sculpture, video, and painting, the exhibition proposes a new view of ink art for the contemporary era. Ink Dreams features 78 works by 53 artists from Asia, Europe, and North America, and is organized in three thematic sections — apparitions, meditations, and dreamscapes. This is the first presentation of work from the Fondation INK Collection, a 400-piece collection of contemporary art in the spirit of ink.

“Reflecting the larger collection, Ink Dreams offers a unique and novel understanding of contemporary ink art as a genre defined by soft qualities and common themes as opposed to one defined solely by the materials of ink and paper. (…) LACMA is indebted to the immense generosity of Gérard and Dora Cognié, profound collectors and founders of the Fondation INK Collection,” says LACMA CEO and Wallis Annenberg Director Michael Govan.

The exhibition is on view until 12 December 2021.

Image: Matti Kujasalo, Painting (detail), 2011, acrylic on canvas, 175 × 175 cm

The group show features 28 artists representing six generations, all evolving from the Helsinki School, the internationally acclaimed Finnish art phenomena. The exhibition celebrates how ideas can be transformed through a shared collective dialogue. It combines new works and installations juxtaposed with historical pieces that exemplify how this unique educational platform has opened up new perspectives on how we experience photography. 

Watch Jorma Puranen’s and Santeri Tuori’s interviews here.

Image: Jorma Puranen, Black Snow: The 1968 Thule nuclear disaster, 2021

Representing colorist concreteism, the works complement the walls of Wärtsilänkatu’s 1960’s buildings. The murals are located at the north and south ends of two of the houses. The apartment buildings that serve as the basis of the mural are in residential use. When finished, Järvenpää’s mural complex is the largest in Finland, consisting of four apartment buildings, with a total size of more than 1000 m2.

Photo: Ilkka Vuorinen | Upeart

32 contemporary artists were selected to present their own interpretation of the Paradise concept. Among the participating names are Berlinde De Bruyckere, Jeremy Deller, Kendell Geers, Ugo Rondinone, Yoko Ono, fashion designer duo Viktor&Rolf, scenographer Albert Dubosq and choreographer William Forsythe, among others.

The artists were given the freedom to express a personal and critical view about how they see and interpret the utopian dream of paradise. The project was born out of an urgency to respond to the current atmosphere that is seemingly miles away from a hopeful, positive and utopian one.

Installation view: Jacob Dahlgren, The Wonderful World of Abstraction, 2021. Photo: Mathieu Van de Sompe

The dress Delphos, made in 1907 in Venice, was considered one of the most important creations of fashion designer Mariano Fortuny (1871-1949). The pleating machine that made the dress possible was actually invented by his wife, Henriette Nigrin. In later years it was revealed that she was also the designer of Delphos.

Furunes is known for her monochrome portraits of individuals who have been marginalized, forgotten or silenced in the history. From Fortuny’s archives she found photos of anonymous women who wove his textiles. Of these photos she has recreated portraits using her own perforating technique, highlighting the life and craft of the women and unraveling the stories behind the genius-myths of art history.

Photo: Plissé, Anne-Karin Furunes, Nordenfjeldske Kunstindustrimuseum / Stiftsgården | Photo: Freia Beer

On a small pier Aho’s new site-specific installation A Poem by a Plumber directly addresses the sea surrounding it. An underlying idea is giving the sea a chance to show a side other than the familiar, horizontal, rippling surface that reflects the sky and the heavenly bodies. Aho takes the sea for what it is: water. Using a water pump and various types of pipes, gutters, nozzles and mechanical parts she constructs a stage for the sea to show off its raiment. The work is a tribute to lazy, listless summer days when we let the wind and weather decide what is to happen.

Image: Heini Aho, A Poem by a Plumber, 2021, water pump, iron, copper, brass, porcelain, enamelled containers, hand towel, textile, salt and seawater | Photo: Ahmed Alalousi

The works of around 90 established and emerging artists from 34 countries, including Olafur Eliasson, Aslan Goisum, Mona Hatoum, Ilya and Emilia Kabakov, Zhanna Kadyrova, Alicja Kwade, Roman Ondak, Wolfgang Tillmans and Erwin Wurm, reflect the phenomenal diversity and vitality of Europe ́s contemporary art scene. Diversity United sheds light on themes such as freedom and democracy, migration and territory, political and personal identity, utopias and fears, which also revolve around the current pandemic. The exhibition reflects the complexity of the European idea and its social realities in a globalized world, underlining the value of cross-cultural conversation.

“Europe thrives because of its artistic and cultural diversity. It is the artists who show us how to overcome existing borders in order to explore common ground. In a particularly striking manner, the exhibition ‘Diversity United’ encourages us to think about these things”, Hermann Parzinger, President of the Foundation of Prussian Cultural Heritage says.

Image: Marko Vuokola, The Seventh Wave – Flora (Sharpen) in Diversity United, Flughafen Tempelhof Berlin | Photo: Silke Briel / © Stiftung für Kunst und Kultur, Bonn

Between Us presents works that were born when artists Karoliina Hellberg, Tero Kuitunen and Raimo Saarinen were given free rein to create new art for areas outside of the exhibition hall, within the museum and Bio Rex cinema. These site-specific works were born out of a dialogue with the architecture of the museum, the Lasipalatsi building and their chronological strata. This study of spatiality took the artists into the realms of frantic consumer culture, a rewilding post-human world and parallel realities.

The exhibition features two installations by Hellberg. In her works, she examines the relationships between art, viewer and space. The worlds of paintings and works on paper extend beyond the frame to works in glass, stone and bronze, lithographed wallpaper, and for the first time to moving images as well. The installation Low-Pressure, which plays with the scale of the cinema, is made up of works on paper hanging on the premiere wall and a cine film showing on a small screen. In an installation in the underground exhibition space, Hellberg ponders the idea of the afterlife and parallel realities.

18 contemporary artists from different cultural and artistic backgrounds have been invited to create an interactive, unprecedented exhibition experience, transforming the site “into a junction point between time, space and reality”, with art as a medium of connection. The viewer becomes a “time traveler”, shuttling between different exhibition scenes that has been divided into four tenses: Past Future, Present Continuous, Present Simple and Future Continuous.

“Time is eternal, while space has no boundary. As the connection point of the two, people connect time and space together, and generate the spark of thought and philosophical meditation”, says curator Zhao Yan.

The works displayed from Grönlund-Nisunen are 24 Hours (2005), Lines and Circles (2007) and Pneumatic Cloud (2007/2021).

In Clervaux, Luxembourg, Tuori’s works from series Forest and Sky are on view until 25 March 2022. Clervaux – cité de l’image is an organisation dedicated to the medium of contemporary photography. The images are hung in large scale under the open sky, spreading all over the town and its gardens. “Santeri Tuori’s photographs seem like pictures from a parallel world, a universe which underlies the law of time while moving and existing outside of human paradigms.” (A. Meyer)

Also, Tuori’s photobook Time is No Longer Round  has been nominated as the finalist for Photobook Award of the year award by Association of Photographic Artists and the Finnish Museum of Photography.

Image: Sky 7, 2012, 55,5 x 45 cm, pigment print mounted under acrylic

The materials used in the work are geometric grids of steel mesh panels and planted rowan trees, standing out against light elements. Seen from the air, the elements form a cross resembling a marking on a map. In autumn and winter, when the trees are bare, the work resembles a reduced line drawing, forming new patterns depending on the direction of the viewer. In spring, when the trees are in bloom, the work gets a colorful canopy. In summer and autumn, during the rowan berry season, it provides shelter and food for birds.

“The key elements of the work are playing with two- and three-dimensionality, the contrasts of light and shadow, and the juxtaposition of natural and controlled growth,” says Laitinen. “In the beginning rowans are still quite delicate, but over the years they grow and strengthen, so the ratio of the trees to the grid is constantly changing.”

The exhibition observes the changing sea around us and the emotional states reflected by it. Responsibility, consequence, vulnerability and the co-existence of humans and nature are examined through the works of contemporary international and Finnish artists. What we see in the horizon and under the rippling surface depends on the choices we make today. Things that we have taken for granted might become uncertain in the future.

WAM accepts limited number of visitors at a time. Exhibition visits need to be booked in advance.

Image: Hreinn Fridfinnsson, I have seen the sea through my tears | Courtesy of Museum Centre of Turku

The installation consists of three circles, created with LED strips with regularly changing colours, studying possible corresponds between musical triads and the tricolour combinations. The seven-colour palette, based on the ideas of physicist Sir Isaac Newton, can be seen as similar to the octave in Western music, which includes seven whole tones.

“Many of our works involve randomness, which is often based on natural phenomena, such as the fluctuations in radioactive background radiation. Even if its average stays constant, there may be vast variations within a short period of time. The works have a life of their own within specifically set threshold values for the works’ control systems. What’s fascinating about randomness is that, despite our rational efforts, life is always random in the end,” the artists say.

Photo: HAM / Kirsi Halkola

Kari Vehosalo’s art is rooted in reality and based on a critical examination of it. The imagery of the history of art, the concepts of philosophy and psychology and the facts and fictions of Hollywood all constitute starting points for Vehosalo’s works. At the heart of it are light and darkness and the beauty and terror of being.

In Vehosalo’s paintings, technical skill is combined with an imagery of cool beauty, in which a monochromatic palate lends a distancing effect to images of reality depicted with photographic exactitude. In his pictures he tends to place some disturbing element that shatters our sense of familiarity and security – and thereby summons up questions. For him art means above all deliberation.

A richly illustrated book containing articles by the philosophers Sanna Tirkkonen and Juha Varto is published in conjunction with the exhibition, and is also available at Galerie Anhava.

YLE interviewed Vehosalo right before the opening of the exhibition. Watch the video here (the interview is in Finnish).

Photo: Sakari Piippo

“With a deliberate focus on wall-based works, we present sculptural forms in which the boundaries between painting and sculpture are explored, blurred and suspended. Because these objects, while possessing dimensional qualities, inhabit the wall, a place traditionally occupied by painting, they reference painting yet function beyond it.”

Image: Jussi Niva, Innermost, 2018, oil on board | Photo: Jussi Tiainen

We welcome you to have a look at the ongoing exhibition and browse the recent works by artist Jani Hänninen, as well as a collection of graphic prints and unseen paper works. Read more about the methods behind Hänninen’s artistic work from Odd One Out – Inner flow, a text by Aleksandra Oilinki based on discussions with the artist, and have a glimpse at one of the artist’s many notebooks, filled to the brim with sketches and drawings.

Enter the viewing room: https://galerieanhava.viewingrooms.com

“Just like us and our various states of mind themselves, her (Sunna’s) figures simply exist and yet reveal something that goes beyond the actual motif and tells us so much more than what we see. They seem incredibly close to us – in times of digital communication culture, when we long for real, authentic feelings – and especially today, in a moment when everything that used to be ‘normal’ has suddenly passed away, a moment when physical closeness is indefinitely disrupted by closures and social distance bans.” 

Image: Servant, 2020, oil on canvas, 41 x 41 cm

To guarantee a safe visit to all, please note that we limit the number of visitors to 5 persons at a time, and require our visitors to wear a face mask. We have hand sanitizer and masks available at the gallery.

We kindly ask that you keep safe distances and maintain hand hygiene when visiting the gallery. Please refrain from visiting the exhibition if you are feeling even slightly ill. 

If you would like to visit the exhibition privately, please contact us at galerie(at)anhava.com or +358 9 669 989.

We wish you a pleasant and safe visit!

Image: Jani Hänninen, installation view
Photo: Jussi Tiainen