GALLERY KALHAMA&PIIPPO AT ART HELSINKI 09 ART FAIR
Gallery Kalhama&Piippo has the privilege to present three artists on the Art Helsinki 09 art fair. The gallery will present new and recent works by painters Jussi Niva, Anna Retulainen and Miikka Vaskola. Welcome to our booth F3.
Jussi Niva (b. 1966) explores questions about time, duration and movement in his work. Niva concentrates on the making up and braking down of a situation and the relationship between a work of art and architecture. At the same time, in an intriguing way, he moves in the middle ground between figurative and abstract. The subject of a painting is an extract of any earlier seen surroundings – a wall of a building, a glass surface or a view gliding past. The painting in itself is a kind of a “mirror” or a performative event, and the work draws its existence from “following” that act. Niva graduated from the school of the Finnish Fine Arts Academy in 1988 and he represented Finland in the Venice Biennale in 1993 and was featured in the Carnegie Art Award exhibition tour in 2007. Niva lives and works in Helsinki and he acts as professor of Painting at the Finnish Academy of Fine Arts. Niva’s most recent project is a public artwork titled ”M In Us” and it will be completed in Stockholm in the spring of 2010.
Anna Retulainen (s.1969) examines in her body of work the complexity between the tradition of painting and contemporary art. She combines traditional fruit and vegetable still lives and flower arrangements with impulsive and spontaneous painting. Retulainen paints expressively and boldly “from memory” or by “imagining”. What is pictured is irrelevant. Instead the physical painting and the brushstrokes that transmit the feeling of presence is what is most important and central in the artist’s work. In Retulainen’s new series of works Touching Caravaggio the artist has been inspired by a Caravaggio painting in Villa Borghese in Rome. The Touching Caravaggio -series refers to the painting as a conceptual process and as figurative thinking. In 2007 Retulainen had a large solo show in the Amos Andersson Art Museum and she has participated actively in group exhibitions also internationally.
Miikka Vaskola (b.1975) sometimes reworks the canvas he uses as the base for his paintings very heavily and at other times he leaves a sense of blankness to the painting. An abstract painting is for Vaskola a slow place – a place for reflection. His working process is very long although the works might at first glance seem spontaneous and fast. Vaskola’s paintings do offer a chance for lingering reflection and open up as time goes by. In addition to abstract landscapes Vaskola also paints very realistically created figures. Just as the figurative paintings, also the abstract worlds in Vaskola’s art take the viewer deep in to times past. Miikka Vaskola has graduated from the Finnish Academy of Fine Arts in 2008. In the same year the artist had a solo exhibition in the Turku Art Museum. In the fall of 2010 Vaskola’s new works can be seen in a solo show at Gallery Kalhama&Piippo.
Gallery Kalhama & Piippo Contemporary