Elina Brotherus
Spaces and Places
Helsinki Contemporary, Helsinki
31 March - 15 May 2023
Swimming Pool (Seated), 2022
Pigment ink print, framed
6 + 2 a.p.
70 x 93
Parasol, 2021
Pigment ink print, framed
6 + 2 a.p.
90 x 120
Hôtel de Sebald 5, 2019
Pigment ink print, framed
6 + 2 a.p.
90 x 67
Morgen i Ny-Hellesund, 2018
Pigment ink print, framed
6 + 2 a.p.
90 x 120
ELINA BROTHERUS’ (b. 1972) Spaces and Places is the artist’s first gallery exhibition in Finland in a long time, and her first-ever show at Helsinki Contemporary. The gallery space is filled with a previously unseen set of works from four different series of photographs. The exhibition is made up of dialogues with works by the famous artists Amaldus Nielsen, René Magritte and John Baldessari, and of a selection of pictures made at the Didrichsen Art Museum. The dialogue between artists adds a temporal dimension to the exhibition, a journey from romanticism, via surrealism, to the core of postmodern contemporary art.
Spaces and Places is a combination of outdoor and indoor spaces, of gazes at and away from. In the pictures in the exhibition Elina Brotherus takes up a position in space that is always relative to the surroundings and the landscape, but also to art history. The dialogue with these paintings or with the texts made by deceased artists becomes visible. The pictures are events, but at the same time they are spaces in which a friendship is enacted. Through them the connection to someone else who is personally important is made real. “Artists need other artists. We have teachers from our student days, and later on self-chosen ones, to offer us a helping hand. Connections, chains, affinities and friendships are important. They are places where art is thought about and enthused about.”
The genesis of the works is bound up with stories, adventures and visits around Europe. Following in the footsteps of the 19th-century Norwegian Romantic painter Amaldus Nielsen (1838–1932), Elina Brotherus got to photograph in Ny-Hellesund, an archipelago off South Norway, in the same landscape that Nielsen painted more than a hundred years ago. In her pictures Elina Brotherus has captured sunrises and sunsets, as Nielsen did in his time. “I thought it was interesting that he had painted a lot of works of the same place, it involved a serial thinking that is attractive to a photographer: that one picture is not enough and cannot tell us everything, that the content, which transcends the individual pictures, arises out of variants, out of observing and showing the variation.”
Elina Brotherus’ attraction to the art of the Belgian René Magritte (1898–1967) has lasted the longest. She already delved deep into the surrealist artist’s production when she was young and living in Brussels, on visits to museums there. At that time, she was particularly interested in the history of old art, but also in the various possibilities of the photograph. “Surrealism reminds us of the complexity of things. It is a poetic way of saying we don’t understand everything.” Elina Brotherus was particularly inspired by Magritte’s ideas. In the exhibition familiar symbols from Magritte’s paintings come to life, interpreted by Elina Brotherus. A mirror in the middle of a field punches a hole through the landscape, and a hotel-room window as if opens onto another reality. Ordinary issues and objects find a place in surprising settings. “Magritte has his own vocabulary. If I take a picture with a cloud, or an umbrella, I inevitably cast my mind back to Magritte.”
On a more personal level the pictures are publicly avowed tributes, contact makings, and rememberings. In her works Elina Brotherus has for years used the list of ideas that the US conceptual artist John Baldessari (1931–2020) gave to his pupils in the 1970s. In the Helsinki Contemporary exhibition the dialogue with Baldessari has links with the coloured dots that have become his trademark. In the new works in the Baldessari in the Park series place and space emerge as landscape-like shots, in private moments that can be light-hearted or profound. In the pictures Elina Brotherus makes adventurous experiments in the grounds of Château du Bois-Héroult in Normandy using coloured berets. With this gesture she transposes Baldessari’s circular symbols from paper to space. The dots give structure to the picture surface and direct the eye. They are also accents that point out something worth noticing in the surrounding landscape.
Four works from the Visitor (Villa Didrichsen) series that Elina Brotherus shot at the Didrichsen Art Museum in 2021–2022 are being shown as part of the Helsinki Contemporary exhibition. The starting point for these images was the freedom to work with an entire art collection, while making use of the building’s architecture and interiors. The figures in the pictures – the visitors – bring the space to life with their presence, suggesting alternative realities alongside the actual history of this building designed by Viljo Revell (1958, 1964). At Didrichsen, Brotherus, who is known as a colourist, got to be curator of her own pictures. She was able to pick out paintings from the Museum’s collections, for instance, to match the colours of her compositions.
ELINA BRTHERUS
Elina Brotherus works since more than twenty years in photography and moving image. Her work has been alternating between autobiographical and art-historical approaches. Her early works on subjective experiences gave way to photographs dealing with the human figure and the landscape, the relation of the artist and the model. In her current work she is revisiting Fluxus event scores and other written instructions for performance-oriented art of the 1950s-70s. Another big theme in her current practice is architecture. Elina Brotherus photographs in private houses designed by important architects, taking roles of various imagined characters and bringing a tranquil human presence to these iconic spaces of architectural heritage. Elina Brotherus lives and works in Helsinki, Finland and Avallon, France. She has an MA degree in Photography from the University of Art and Design Helsinki (now Aalto University) and an MSc in Chemistry from the University of Helsinki. Elina Brotherus started exhibiting internationally in 1997. Her works are in nearly 80 public collections including the Pompidou Centre, Paris, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Denmark, Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki, and Moderna Museet, Stockholm, to name a few, and she has published 13 monographs. Elina Brotherus has been awarded, among others, Carte blanche PMU, France, in 2017, the Finnish State Prize for Photography in 2008, and the Prix Niépce in 2005.
HELSINKI CONTEMPORARY
Bulevardi 10, 00120 Helsinki
