SAARA EKSTRÖM: EXCESS AND ASCESIS
22.1-28.2.2010
Kalhama&Piippo is proud to present photographic and video artist Saara Ekström’s recent body of work in the exhibition where the artist deepens her journey of exploration into the aesthetical and physical, the ugly and beautiful, the real and unbelievable. The gutlike fruit and plant clusters in the large-scale photographs seem to live their own uncontrollable life; the formal and ascetic still lifes find their opposite in excess.
Ekström comments and reconstructs the classical nature morte and vanitas motifs in her body of work. The photographs refer to symbolic still life images, but also draw attention to the tension between the object and the space around it – the relation between full and empty.
Saara Ekström is known for using various techniques. The materials of her photographic works, videos and installations are both non-organic and living organisms. Plants, oysters, mushrooms or hair are transformed into non-definitive, mysterious and fascinating images. As museum director Bera Nordal has described Ekström’s art*, the magical micro-cosmoses of hers are metaphors of life itself; the deepest core of its continuous cycle.
Pilvi Kalhama
'Saara Ekström (b.1965) has exhibited her art in both solo exhibitions and highly respected group shows in Finland and internationally, for example in the United States and Japan. In 2010 she participates in a group show called memory Traces in Kobelez’s Ludwig Museum in Germany and her works are part of the Carnegie Art Award exhibition tour. In 2011 Ekström has two large solo shows at the Musuem of Contemporary Art Kiasma in Helsinki and at the Kuntsi Museum of Modern Art in Vasa.
The exhibition has been supported by Grönqvistska stiftelsen and Pukkila.
* Saara Ekström, Liquid Life. Nordiska akvarellmuseet, 2008.
Gallery Kalhama & Piippo Contemporary