Anne-Karin Furunes
Tornabuoni Arte, Florence
June 8 – September 29, 2018
Anne-Karin Furunes (Trondheim – Norway, 1961), first studied art in Oslo and in Trondheim and then architecture in London and in Copenhagen. She made a series of public works in Norway and held solo-exhibitions in Europe, Canada and the United States. Some of her works are displayed in important collections, like the National Museum of Contemporary Art, in Oslo, the National Museum of China, in Beijing, and the Museum of Art and Design, in New York.
In her paintings, Anne-Karin Furunes uses archival photos of nameless faces to examine their personality and identity. She analyzes the faded photographic features and looks for traces of forgotten lives and personalities that have been ignored by the eye of history. The ingredients skillfully used by the artist in her canvasses, are light and memory. Her works draw on the course of history and of the human being that lives through it. Only in her later paintings does the artist start to depict natural elements. As Rachele Ferrario writes in this exhibition’s catalogue, “Anne Karin Furunes has focused for many years on history, on today’s ever impelling need to conserve for preserving and to preserve for bequeathing. The faces of women to whom she gave new life tell us of their personal and collective struggles and remind us of the tragedies that shaped Europe and the Western world: the fall of the Tsarist and Austro-Hungarian Empires, two world wars, the Holocaust and eugenics, the cold war. Then she decided to give voice to the fights the youths of the 1980s were standing up for: the Chinese students’ protest against the government in Tienanmen Square (to which she dedicated a series of portraits) and the fall of the Berlin Wall”.
Anne-Karin Furunes observes and memorizes the photographs, then she reproduces them on surfaces coated by thousands of perforations. This technique, achieved by using a stamp and a hammer, has an artisan, almost sculptural dimension to it. These hand-punches have different dimensions in order to make the light pass through and define the lines of the image, thanks to the dynamics of the chiaroscuro. The perforation functions as a negative, as an engraving plate.
At first glance, what we see in the work is a canvas filled with perfect and different-sized holes. Only by distancing ourselves from it can we finally see a face, or a landscape appear. What at the beginning was simply an allusion to the image portrayed, becomes a more clear and defined depiction, as we walk away from the canvas. If we miss the right point of view, the image disappears.
Of her drawings of holes Anne-Karin Furunes says: “The image evaporates as soon as we approach the canvas. If you look closely, you will only see the walls through the empty holes”.
It is thanks to the variation of light and weather conditions they are surrounded by, that these works keep enriching and enjoying new life.
TORNABUONI ARTE
Lungarno Benvenuto Cellini, 3 – 50125 Florence
