Artist Lasse Juuti: Public Artwork in Oulunkylä - Helsinki - "The Contemporaries"

Lasse Juuti: The Contemporaries

Public Artwork in Oulunkylä - Helsinki 

Unveiling Ceremony: 14 June 2024 

LASSE JUUTI

The Contemporaries (detail), 2024 

HAM Helsinki Art Museum 

Photo: Sonja Hyytiäinen

LASSE JUUTI

The Contemporaries (detail), 2024 

HAM Helsinki Art Museum 

Photo: Sonja Hyytiäinen

LASSE JUUTI

The Contemporaries (detail), 2024 

HAM Helsinki Art Museum 

Photo: Sonja Hyytiäinen

LASSE JUUTI

The Contemporaries (detail), 2024 

HAM Helsinki Art Museum 

Photo: Sonja Hyytiäinen

A new public artwork, The Contemporaries, by artist LASSE JUUTI, has been installed in Oulunkylä. The proposal to brighten up the station with art came from the Oulunkylä residents through the OmaStadi participatory budgeting. The work has been curated by HAM Helsinki Art Museum, and an unveiling ceremony will take place at Oulunkylän Seurahuone on 14 June 2024. The Deputy Mayor for Culture and Leisure of Helsinki, Paavo Arhinmäki, will unveil the artwork, and the artist will be present at the event. The unveiling ceremony is open for all.

Lasse Juuti’s The Contemporaries explores the sense of time. In the work, you may see clocks, bicycles, and a pump trolley familiar from the railways. According to the artist, the brothers Now and Soon, with their moustaches shaped like clock hands, are turning the time forward by riding the pump trolley, stretching up to the ceiling of the underpass as they work. Sense of time is a malleable and even a fragmented experience: sometimes time flies by, sometimes it seems to drag on.

On the opposite wall, a piece resembling dandelion has sprouted on the wall. Upon closer inspection a historical high-wheel bicycle turned upside down. Its large wheel is positioned in front of the sun, and the figure riding the bike is keeping the sun – and thus time – moving. According to the artist, the work refers, among other things, to a sundial, which tells the time through the movements of shadows and light.

To celebrate the inauguration of Lasse Juuti’s work, an unveiling ceremony open to all Helsinki residents is held on 14 June 2024. The event starts at Oulunkylän Seurahuone, and the work will be unveiled in the station underpass at the end of the event. HAM Helsinki Art Museum’s Director Arja Miller will give the opening remarks of the event, and Helsinki Deputy Mayor for Culture and Leisure Paavo Arhinmäki will inaugurate the artwork.

- It is wonderful to finally get to unveil this work of art exploring time in a playful and multidimensional way. Lasse Juuti created the work specifically for the Oulunkylä station and residents of Oulunkylä. For us at HAM, it is important to bring art near people’s everyday lives in urban environments, Museum Director Arja Miller says.

 

Lasse Juuti at his studio

Photo: HAM / Maija Toivanen

Lasse Juuti (b. 1990) is known for his playful works stretching the boundaries of painting. Lasse Juuti’s pieces often break away from the traditional flat and rectangular form of painting, turning into three-dimensional combinations of painting and sculptures. The works are based on daily observations, a strong sense of rhythm, and references to architectural environment.

OmaStadi is Helsinki’s way of implementing participatory budgeting. It means that city residents can suggest ideas and vote on how residential areas are developed. The OmaStadi proposal to bring art to the Oulunkylä station underpass came from the Oulunkylä residents in 2021. The proposal received 464 votes and has now been realised.

Lasse Juuti’s work was curated by HAM Helsinki Art Museum, and it was created in cooperation with the City of Helsinki’s Culture and Leisure Division and Urban Environment Division. The work will be added to the City of Helsinki’s art collection, which is managed and curated by HAM.

Hanna Hyy, Lasse Juuti, Tuuli Kerätär, Linda Roschier @ Helsinki Contemporary - Modern Love

Hanna Hyy, Lasse Juuti, Tuuli Kerätär, Linda Roschier

Modern Love

Helsinki Contemporary, Helsinki

26 November - 19 December, 2021

In place of a common theme the exhibition Modern Love at Helsinki Contemporary highlights the uniqueness of four different painters, providing a sample of the state of current contemporary painting right now.

HANNA HYY

Tämänhetkinen tilanteesi / Your Current Situation, 2021

Watercolour and oil on sandwich board, 120 x 100 cm

© Hanna Hyy, Photo: Jussi Tiainen, Courtesy Helsinki Contemporary

The starting points for Hanna Hyy’s paintings are various models: toys, ornaments, and biological specimens. She begins her process by looking for objects, often finding them in flea markets, but occasionally also in rubbish skips, as with the biological specimens that have now been given space in her new works. After choosing an object or objects, Hyy constructs a still life, which she paints ‘from life’. The inanimate model for the painting is humanized into being a ‘substitute experiencer’, a figure with whom we can identify, and who appears as the painting’s actor or on whose viewpoint the work is based. Hyy’s paintings seek to raise issues and experiences that elude everyday language, and also coincident contradictions.

HANNA HYY (b. 1990 Helsinki), graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts, Helsinki, in 2019. She has had solo exhibitions, for instance, at Galleria Huuto and Kosminen in Helsinki, and appeared in group exhibitions in Finland and abroad, including the Charlottenborg Spring Exhibition. Hyy’s paintings are in several private collections and the Hämäläis-Osakunta (Tavastia Nation) collection. Thank you to the Arts Promotion Centre Finland for supporting the artist's work.

LASSE JUUTI

Exhibition view: Modern Love

© Lasse Juuti, Photo: Jussi Tiainen, Courtesy Helsinki Contemporary

One of the starting points for Lasse Juuti’s works that combine painting, collage and object assemblages has been games and nest building. In the Modern Love exhibition we see two painting/sculpture hybrids on the floor, in the form language of one we find a car and in the other a trailer, transformed into a ping-pong court and a sarcophagus. Typical of Juuti’s works is, on the one hand, the key role played by the materials, but also the construction of disparate visual narratives. On this occasion, a series of paintings made on large plywood boards is linked via its materials to the floor-standing works, which converse with one another to tell a story. In the plywood boards leaning against the wall Juuti constructs a work using both painting and collage.

LASSE JUUTI (b. 1990 Tampere) has studied at the Academy of Fine Arts, Helsinki, and Tampere School of Art and Communication. He has had solo exhibitions at Monitoimitila O. in Helsinki, Titanik in Turku, and HAM Gallery in Helsinki. Most recently Juuti’s works were shown in the summer 2021 Porvoo Triennial. His works are represented in HAM’s and Kiasma’s collections. Thank you to the Arts Promotion Centre Finland and the Finnish Cultural Foundation (Uusimaa Regional Fund), for supporting the artist's work.

TUULI KERÄTÄR

Soft rubble, 2021

Oil on canvas, 154 x 150 cm

© Tuuli Kerätär, Photo: Jussi Tiainen, Courtesy Helsinki Contemporary

Tuuli Kerätär’s abstract paintings move forwards without prior planning, in a dialogue between forms and colours. The sketching and the partially erased layers become part of the works, creating the feeling of dense, layered space characteristic of Kerätär’s works. In her paintings she returns to memories of places where she has felt she could see behind the physical surroundings. Other paintings also act as stimuli for further works, and she has recently been particularly interested in Frans Marc. The motifs of Kerätär’s latest works are grids and squares, which allude to a space viewed through a digital screen. The glow seen through the grids becomes the central element in the works. At times, it illuminates the space like the warm California morning sun that ripens fruit. While, at other times, the glow is pale and cold, like looking into a stranger’s apartment from the outside, into an empty room filled with the light from a television.

TUULI KERÄTÄR (b. 1985 Turku) graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts, Helsinki, in 2019. She has had solo exhibitions, e.g., at the Exhibition Laboratory Project Room in Helsinki, and at Gumbostrand Konst & Form in Sipoo, and appeared in group exhibitions in Helsinki, Rovaniemi and Antwerp. Kerätär’s works are in the collections of the Academy of Fine Arts, Helsinki, Rovaniemi Art Museum and Oulu University Hospital.

LINDA ROSCHIER

Double barred green cross remedy, 2021

Oil on canvas, 41 x 33 cm

© Linda Roschier, Photo: Jussi Tiainen, Courtesy Helsinki Contemporary

Linda Roschier’s painting process begins organically. The elements are built up one step at a time, with the painting carrying it forwards. Sometimes, a work has its starting point in another work, and the motif is repeated, but resolved in a slightly different way. Sometimes, Roschier’s small paintings serve as laboratories for large works, in which she can try out compositions and motifs. Looking and seeing are recurrent themes in her working process, as are various natural phenomena. The paintings in Modern Love contain numerous elements, such as sea shells, pearls, the plant world, and emojis, which evoke various mental associations in the viewer. These works are powerfully rooted in our time, but Roschier also feels an affinity with esoteric pictorial traditions, and occasionally makes references to modernism and earlier practices.

LINDA ROSCHIER (b. 1979 Vantaa) graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts, Helsinki, in 2020. She has had solo exhibitions at Galleria Huuto and the Exhibition Laboratory Project Room in Helsinki, and at Gallery Vanha Kappalaisentalo in Porvoo. Roschier has also taken part in group exhibitions and her works have been acquired by the Finnish Art Society and private collectors. Thank you to the Arts Promotion Centre Finland and the Finnish Cultural Foundation (Uusimaa Regional Fund), for supporting the artist's work.

HELSINKI CONTEMPORARY

Bulevardi 10, 00120 Helsinki

helsinkicontemporary.com