Galerie Anhava
viennacontemporary 2016

KRISTJÁN GUDMUNDSSON (born 1941 in Iceland) is an artist of a pure and concise visual language of his own devising. He joins together minimalism and conceptualism in a way that has brought him international acclaim. An economy of expression and the belief that fewer words carry more weight is highly visible in Kristján Gudmundsson’s work. Its underlying theme, embodied not only in works on paper, but also in book art and sculptural assemblages, is the very idea of drawing. The Olympic Drawings represent a new twist in the artist’s approach, combining aspects seen in various of his earlier work in a way that opens up a new perspective.

MATTI KUJASALO (born 1946 in Finland) has worked on issues of systematic constructivist art for the past forty-five years. He has created a completely unique grammar of his own and a visual idiom following its rules that is expressive, richly nuanced and unpredictable. The structures, logic and internal development of Kujasalo's earlier works are mostly easy to read and comprehend, while his more recent paintings are structurally more complex, making viewer give up, reject "understanding" and accept the inexplicability and mystery of sensory pleasure.

VESA-PEKKA RANNIKKO (born 1968 in Finland) is a versatile artist working with painting, sculpture, video and installation. Rannikko’s abstract compositions carry marks left of the casting process, as well as a distinctly temporal aspect as documents of the process of casting, drying and recasting. His most recent works present castings made of pigmented plaster. The works investigate the relationship between painting and sculpture and raise questions about the relationship between the two mediums.

Painterly devices and gestures have a strong presence in the works of Finnish artist ANNA TUORI (b.1976 in Finland). The artist is interested in the concept of 'Das Unheimliche’, or ‘uncanny’. Tuori paints with acrylic and oil, often employing thin layers of paint dimly shining through each other, accentuating parts of the painting in oils that create thick accumulations of colour similar to relief. Tuori’s large painting “Splendor in the Grass II” presents us with a field of solid colour, in the centre of which, through undulating strokes of oil paint, a snowy landscape appears.

MARKO VUOKOLA (born 1967 in Finland) is an artist who is particularly interested in issues of seeing, perception, knowledge and time. In his new body of work, Vuokola displays a series of photographs of a watch. His photograph “One to One” contains two pictures of a watch. On the one hand, the title refers to the watch in the picture being precisely the same size as the actual watch, 1:1. On the other hand, the time shown by the watch on the left is a minute before one, one to one. The works are related to Vuokola’s earlier series of works The Seventh Wave, which presented two views from a given location with some interval of time having passed between the photographs. The perspective is now different: the “theme” of the piece is time, its duration precisely shown to us by the image.