Susanne Gottberg: In the Beginning There Was Nothing

Susanne Gottberg: In the Beginning There Was Nothing
Galerie Forsblom 5.5.–28.5.2017
Opening with the artist in attendance, 4.5.2015, 17.00–19.00

In her new exhibition, Susanne Gottberg scrutinizes her relationship with painting and color. Having returned to painting on canvas, she has abandoned her former subdued palette and effacement of authorship in favor of bright hues and a freer style of expression.

Her new excursion into the world of color and idiosyncratic gesture lend her paintings a more subjective quality. Her colors evoke instant reactions: they awaken memories and excite the senses. The process of painting has impelled her to unleash the full force and experience of color. When color takes over, thought is temporarily suspended, rendered impossible and pointless. The power of color is liberating and healing.

Applying her paint in bold strokes, she conjures illusions of glass surfaces and details that cast reflections of the world outside the painting. Gottberg paints objects, but she ultimately also treats the painting as an object. She sees the viewer as being part of this cycle: observing the paintings turns us, too, into objects in relation to the image. Gottberg’s sense-stirring paintings are imbued with a simultaneous sense of something quietly beginning and something ending, a dual sense of presence and absence.
Gottberg graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in 1989, and held her debut exhibition in Helsinki that same year. She received the Finnish Art Society’s Ducat Prize in 1991 and was chosen as Finland’s Young Artist of the Year in 1994. Her work can be found in a number of major Finnish public and private collections, including the Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma and the Amos Anderson Art Museum.