Oh the Surface, the Dimensions

While Mr. Picasso is still looming somewhere in the near future, waiting for the minimum requirements of the perfect 3 hours all to myself and the consequent five or so hours for reporting the experience here in my blog, I had the chance to walk among a lot of painting the other day.

For a few more weeks, you see, the ground floor or the Amos Anderson Art Museum will continue to be home to Gottberg-Kåhre Project, a most beautiful and captivating piece - or pieces - of art. A Saturday morning before noon is always a good time to visit museums in order to avoid the crowds. With the Gottberg-Kåhre project, I’d say that avoidance was pretty much a precondition for grasping the installation in its entirety. There is no point in describing the experience with facts, as that would equal a spoiler for anyone still planning on visiting; suffice it to say it is an excellent example of interdisciplinary art collaboration between a painter (Susanne Gottberg) and a sculptor, (Markus Kåhre) something that invites the audience to consider the very fundamental qualities of each medium: dimensions of sculpture, surface of painting. Ah. I will have to go again before it closes; I only heard after we had left the museum that my companion spotted several, meaningful things that I had not, despite unhurried and careful observation, noticed.

Once you’re inside the museum, it’s well worth the while to take the elevator up to the top floors that still contain much of Mr. Anderson’s home décor, together with paintings and sculpture from the turn of the 20th century onwards - you’ll spot plenty of Magnus Enckell, the occasional Helene Schjerfbeck, and many others, and all this will further nourish your recent contemplations on painting and sculpture as traditional yet contemporary media - it is quite an excellent combination really! And further fulfilled with a) the middle floors’ exhibition ‘Modernin kahdet kasvot’, a collection of Finnish modern art, curated by Timo Valjakka, and b) finally the refreshing, colourful and often seemingly abstract contemporary paintings (and plastic arts) by artists such as Anna Retulainen, Liisa Lounila and others, all recent purchases to the Museum’s permanent collections, exhibited on the second floor.

What made my Saturday even fuller, was an additional visit to Gallery Heino, where Samuli Heimonen’s saturnine paintings were shown. All but one had already been bought, even if the exhibition “Kaikessa on murtumansa” (from L. Cohen’s line “There’s a crack in everything/---”) is on until the 25th of October. I really liked many of the paintings, such as the dog embraced with several hands, or the bird that is held in someone's hand, whereas others gave me an uneasy feeling I would not like to get in my living room - especially the biggest painting, Laulu, in which a stranded seal is singing a melancholy tune from bottom of its lungs. Or the eerie Yhteinen historia (if I remember the name correctly), in which two people standing on thin ice become the feet of an enormous bat, hanging upside down below the surface. That really made me shiver.

Generally, I am a big fan of ‘new’ media such as moving image and site-specific art, too, but this Painting Saturday somehow came to mean more than the sum of the paintings I saw. The kick-off with Gottberg-Kåhre Project opened my thoughts to the elaboration of light, surface, colours and dimensions, therefore everything that followed was like a new, relevant piece of information. I strongly recommend that whenever you go see an exhibition or a work - make sure you see something else immediately after that, too! If you’re not sure what to see right now, I would go to the brand new Ars Fennica exhibition in Kiasma, to the aforementioned exhibitions in Amos and Heino, and probably to Kalhama & Piippo Contemporary to see the works of Antti Ruuhela (as I’ve been told he is What’s Hot Right Now).

And, honestly, what could be better than wandering around galleries and museums on an unhurried Saturday, sipping some sparkling wine in museum cafés in between? You tell me that.

These friends are an allusion to Picasso, but can anyone tell me how?