Seeing Silence: The Paintings of Helene Schjerfbeck @ The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Seeing Silence: The Paintings of 

Helene Schjerfbeck

Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York 

December 5, 2025 – April 5, 2026

Helene Schjerfbeck (Finnish, 1862‒1946)

Self-Portrait, 1912 

Oil on canvas, 17 1/8 × 16 1/2 in. (43.5 × 42 cm) 

Finnish National Gallery Collection, 

Ateneum Art Museum, Helsinki (A-2016-51) 

Photo: Finnish National Gallery / Yehia Eweis

Beloved in Nordic countries for her highly original style, Finnish painter Helene Schjerfbeck (1862–1946) is relatively unknown to the rest of the world. The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Seeing Silence: The Paintings of Helene Schjerfbeck is the first major exhibition in the United States dedicated to the artist’s work. Featuring nearly 60 works on canvas—including generous loans from the Finnish National Gallery / Ateneum Art Museum, other Finnish museums, and private collections in Finland and Sweden—the exhibition will be on view December 5, 2025, through April 5, 2026.

Born in Helsinki, Helene Schjerfbeck witnessed civil war and two World Wars as well as the burgeoning of Finland’s national identity following independence from Russian rule in 1917. Despite many personal hardships, Helene Schjerfbeck never wavered in her determination to pursue her passion, painting for most of her life in a remote Nordic country, far removed from Europe’s centers of cultural upheaval and renewal. She once said resolutely, “All that I desire to do is to paint… there is always something to conquer.”

“Seeing Silence highlights the work of an extraordinary artist who, though long celebrated in Norway and Sweden as the most outstanding female painter of her time, has not yet achieved well-deserved visibility on this side of the Atlantic,” said Max Hollein, The Met’s Marina Kellen French Director and Chief Executive Officer. “The exhibition invites audiences here to experience Helene Schjerfbeck’s mesmerizing works and distinctive vision for the first time at a major U.S. museum, showcasing the remarkable perspective and introspection of an artist wholly dedicated to her craft over the course of eight decades.”

Dita Amory, Robert Lehman Curator in Charge of the Robert Lehman Collection at The Met, said, “Painting in remote Finland without recourse to broader culture and the exchange of contemporary ideas, Schjerfbeck created her own language every day at her easel by sheer force of will. Seeing Silence looks beyond art history’s cultural mainstream to one woman who overcame immense struggles to produce a powerful body of work, highlighting her rightful place in the story of modernism.”

Seeing Silence traces Schjerfbeck’s artistic development from her early years in Helsinki to the end of her life in Sweden, illuminating the artist’s evolving style from traditional subjects in a naturalist vein to a painterly language of spare, often densely worked imagery. Schjerfbeck sanded and scratched through layers of paint, sometimes exposing the rough weave of her canvases as she experimented with her materials. As a valuable voice among the many strands of modernism at play throughout the world in the early 20th century, Schjerfbeck expressed a unique visual language that deserves recognition in the codified narratives of art history.

The exhibition unfolds thematically, beginning with an exploration of Schjerfbeck’s early years. Recognized as a prodigy at a young age, she won several grants to study in Paris and from there she took excursions to Concarneau in Brittany and later St Ives in Cornwall. Many of her early figure studies were painted in the art schools of Paris, while her more sentimental genre subjects reflect her rural travels. Schooled among artists working in naturalism, she created figure painting and landscapes that followed in step. Within a few years, she was showing paintings at the Salon, Paris’s annual art exhibition, and testing the boundaries of conservative painting.

In the next section, several large-scale canvases commemorate Finnish heritage. After centuries of Swedish occupation, followed by Russian rule, Finland was affirming its cultural identity. A history painting won Schjerfbeck a grant to study in Paris. Later, her compelling allusion to the Jewish festival of Sukkot earned her entrée to the annual state-sponsored Salon in 1883.

In 1902, Helene Schjerfbeck moved to Hyvinkää, a small railroad town several hours north of Helsinki, to care for her aging mother. The isolation of a rural setting enabled her to paint without the disruptions of city life. In modest accommodations and without access to professional models, she painted some of her most affecting canvases, often single figures dressed in black with little color to interrupt their dark silhouettes. Her mother, despite having no interest in her daughter’s vocation, was co-opted to model on several occasions. By this point in her career, Helene Schjerfbeck had radically redefined her aesthetic language. Soft brushwork characterizes these quiet paintings. Whether sitting or standing, reading or sewing, her subjects fill the picture plane and avert their gaze. Often bathed in raking light, her figures appear lost in thought and lost in time. Helene Schjerfbeck investigates formal language—light, space, volume—not the soul of the sitter. She told her models to look away as she painted them, demanded their silence, and refused to show them the end result. Essential to her practice at the start of a painting, the models were dismissed when Schjerfbeck’s inventive powers took charge.

A subsequent section presents a sequence of portraits from the 1920s and 1930s. Helene Schjerfbeck rarely noted a sitter’s name in her titles, and it is very likely that she suppressed her sitters’ identities for the same reasons she eschewed mimetic portraiture: in the few instances when she strove to transfer a likeness to canvas, her efforts often frustrated her until she got it right. Many of her sitters sport modish dress, evidence of Schjerfbeck’s lifelong interest in French fashion. After reading a 1912 article in an art magazine, she fell for the paintings of El Greco (1541–1614). Though she had no access to the originals, she worked up rather stylized transcriptions of his Madonnas and other sacred subjects, a preoccupation that intensified during World War II.

In 1894, the Finnish Art Society sent Schjerfbeck to Vienna and Florence to copy works by the painters Holbein, Velázquez, Fra Angelico, Fra Filippo Lippi, and Giorgione. While in Italy, she painted several ethereal landscapes of Fiesole, perched on a hill above Florence. There, no doubt, she studied the beautiful yet degraded frescoes decorating the city’s churches.

Spanning 50 years of Schjerfbeck’s career, still-life paintings illustrate the artist’s shifting creative language. The Red Apples (1915), unique in her career for its glowing palette, demonstrates the artist’s distinctive technique of layering and removing paint to achieve complex structures. By the 1930s, the artist had reduced her still-life palette to more somber tones, exploiting her fruits to further her surface experiments. In her final still life, painted in 1944, blackening apples metaphorically reference the devastation of World War II and the chaos of upheaval.

Helene Schjerfbeck interrogated her likeness in 40 self-portraits across her lifetime. Her canvases trace the arc of her artistic development as they materialize her physical growth and decline. From youthful expressions in a naturalistic language to facial distortions that anticipate the haunting finale of this series, Schjerfbeck captures her self-image with increasing idiosyncrasy and self-confidence.

In Schjerfbeck’s final years, as war raged throughout Finland, her art dealer persuaded her to relocate to Sweden. From 1944 to her death in 1946, she resided in a hotel in Stockholm. There she painted 20 of her 40 self-portraits. Few other series in the history of modern art articulate mortality with such candor, as the artist used thin, glazed color to produce monochrome representations that are at once haunting and magnificent meditations on the effects of age and illness.

Seeing Silence: The Paintings of Helene Schjerfbeck is curated by Dita Amory, Robert Lehman Curator in Charge of the Robert Lehman Collection at The Met. Anna-Maria von Bonsdorff, director of the Ateneum Art Museum, is the consulting curator.

A fully illustrated catalogue will accompany the exhibition.

This exhibition was organized by The Metropolitan Museum of Art in collaboration with the Finnish National Gallery / Ateneum Art Museum. The exhibition is made possible by Elsa A. Brule.

THE METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART

The Met Fifth Avenue, Gallery 964

1000 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10028

www.metmuseum.org

Nordic noir @ British Museum, London - Works on paper from Edvard Munch to Mamma Andersson

Nordic noir: Works on paper from Edvard Munch to Mamma Andersson

British Museum, London

9 October 2025 – 22 March 2026

Mamma Andersson

The Fallow Deer, 2016

Handprinted colour woodcut on rice paper

Reproduced by permission of the artist 

© The Trustees of the British Museum

Fatima Moallim

Källa, 2021 

Marker pen, oil crayon and graphite

Reproduced by permission of the artist 

© The Trustees of the British Museum

Olafur Eliasson

Don't look to the horizon, 2024 

Watercolour and glacial ice

Courtesy of the artist and i8 Gallery, Reykjavik 

© The Trustees of the British Museum

The British Museum presents around 150 works from 100 different artists in an exhibition celebrating graphic works on paper from the Nordic region. 

Nordic noir: works on paper from Edvard Munch to Mamma Andersson is the culmination of a five-year programme dedicated to building the Museum's collection of post-war Nordic artwork. 

Jennifer Ramkalawon, Curator of Modern and Contemporary Nordic Graphic Art said: 'This project was a five-year voyage of discovery. These countries have so much creativity to offer with contemporary artists exploring themes of nature, the environment, identity and heritage. The artists in the show are well-known in their home countries, but this exhibition aims to showcase the incredible array of talent from the Nordic lands to a wider UK and international audience – many of them are on display for the first time.'  

John Savio

Suopan (Lasso), c.1928-1934

Woodcut

© The Trustees of the British Museum

Henrik Finne

Fiskere, 1942 

Colour woodcut

Reproduced by permission of the artist's estate 

© The Trustees of the British Museum

Showcasing one of the best collections of Nordic art outside the region, the exhibition aims to provide a welcome and stimulating insight into the distinctive art originating there.  

Although Scandinavia is sometimes viewed by outsiders as a homogenous entity, the exhibition highlights individual characteristics and complexities within the various Nordic countries, as well as exploring universal and overarching themes. It also questions the definition of Nordic art and what it means to be a Nordic artist through work by artists who have immigrated to and emigrated from the region.

Edvard Munch

The Old Fisherman, 1897 

Woodcut on Japan paper

© The Trustees of the British Museum

One of the most well-known artists to emerge from Scandinavia is expressionist Edvard Munch. Two of Munch's woodcut prints are featured at the beginning of the exhibition. Following a chronological narrative, it explores how the graphic arts flourished and evolved after his death in 1944. Prints and drawings from 1945 to the present day highlight how the region's artists continue to develop Munch's creative legacy of emotional intensity and artistic inventiveness. 

Lea Ignatius

Soutaja, 1981 

Colour etching

Reproduced by permission of the artist's estate 

© The Trustees of the British Museum

Per Kirkeby 

Untitled, 2016 

Monotype in green, yellow and black ink

Reproduced by permission of the artist's estate 

© The Trustees of the British Museum

Vanessa Baird

My Mother, 2019 

Watercolour

Reproduced by permission of the artist 

© The Trustees of the British Museum

Key themes throughout the exhibition are nature and the vital urgency to preserve the environment of the fjords, mountains and forests unique to the region. The artworks on display also delve into the worlds of Norse myth, inner struggles with mental health, post-war angst and the threat of the Cold War, feminism and the rights of the Indigenous Sámi people. 

Yuichiro Sato 

In the Air III, 2019 

Graphite, mineral pigment, acrylic paint

Reproduced by permission of the artist 

© The Trustees of the British Museum

John Kørner

Understanding the Impact of Architecture 12, 2020

Colour lithograph

Reproduced by permission of the artist 

© The Trustees of the British Museum

Vibeke Slyngstad

Shuafat II, 2023

Watercolour

Reproduced by permission of the artist 

© The Trustees of the British Museum

The landmark collecting project, supported by a substantial grant from charitable organisation AKO Foundation, resulted in the acquisition by the British Museum of almost 400 works by artists from Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden. It has added to the many Nordic prints purchased by the Museum in the 1990s. 

As well as Edvard Munch and Mamma Andersson, featured artists include Olafur Eliasson, John Savio, Vanessa Baird, Yuichiro Sato, Fatima Moallim, John Kørner and many more. 

Xerxes Mazda, Director of Collections said: 'It has been almost 30 years since the British Museum devoted a show to Nordic graphic art. Thanks to the generosity of AKO Foundation, we have been able to build one of the best collections of Nordic art outside the region, investing in and exploring how artists such as Mamma Andersson have developed the legacy of an artist like Edvard Munch. Nordic noir and the collecting strategy behind it showcases the British Museum's commitment to acquiring works for the nation, preserving the work of both up-and-coming and established artists for future generations.'

 

To coincide with the exhibition, a beautifully illustrated catalogue, Nordic noir: works on paper from Edvard Munch to Mamma Andersson, written by Jennifer Ramkalawon, was published by the British Museum Press in October 2025. Paperback, £35, ISBN 9780714136509

BRITISH MUSEUM, LONDON

www.britishmuseum.org

Roland Persson @ Helsinki Contemporary - "Uninvited Guest" Exhibition

Roland Persson

Uninvited Guest

Helsinki Contemporary

3 - 26 October 2025

Helsinki Contemporary presents Swedish sculptor Roland Persson's third solo exhibition at the gallery titled Uninvited Guest.

Roland Persson is known for his surrealistic works based on hyper-realistic silicone casts of objects, animals, and plants. As an artist he explores the interface between consciousness and the subconscious, between humans and nature, and between the private and the public.

The works in this exhibition are partly built on Persson's childhood memory of his aunt's apartment where the furniture was covered with white sheets after the aunt moved to America. The eerie atmosphere of absence in the rooms of the home is conveyed in an installation where we see, among other things, goats walking on a bed. In the gallery, sheets are propped against the walls, resembling a theatre or film set. The pleated silicone, imitating white fabric, drapes, covers, and protects from view. In addition to goats, another animal roaming the quiet installation is the great cormorant, a bird widely regarded as a nuisance in the Nordic archipelago.

Persson's practice is about creating new worlds that strangely resemble reality. The aim of his works is to make the viewer uncertain about their observations. According to Persson, who is familiar with psychoanalysis and draws on it in his art, this uncertainty allows the viewer to liberate their own subconscious. Silicone is a contradictory material and it is well suited to depict the mystical opposites in Persson's art. As a material, it can reproduce details realistically—on the other hand, it is synthetic and "unnatural". The works entice yet can also appear repulsive, at once carnal and ethereal, strange and familiar, perhaps uncanny in psychoanalytic terms.

The exhibition also features drawings on wax-coated paper. As a technique, drawing appears very different from creating large installations, but there is a connection between the two: the drawings are often like abstract and instinctive instructions for the sculptures.

ROLAND PERSSON (b. 1963) graduated from the Umeå University Academy of Fine Arts in 1993 and has been exhibiting ever since. His work has been shown at eg. the Liverpool Biennial (2021), the Ostrobothnian Museum in Vaasa (2023), and Färgfabriken in Stockholm as well as Amos Rex and HAM Helsinki Art Museum in Helsinki (2024), to mention a few.

This year Roland Persson is nominated for one of the biggest art awards in the Nordic countries, Ars Fennica. His works will be on display in the nominees' group exhibition at HAM from October 24, 2025, to March 29, 2026.

HELSINKI CONTEMPORARY

Bulevardi 10, 00120 Helsinki

helsinkicontemporary.com

Arno Westerberg @ Galerie Forsblom, Helsinki - "Soft Eyes" Exhibition

Arno Westerberg: Soft Eyes

Galerie Forsblom, Helsinki

September 26 – October 26, 2025

Arno Westerberg’s new exhibition explores themes of seeing and disappearing. His paintings unfold within a sharply defined moment, delving into the gaze – what we see and, above all, how we see. In his works, “ways of seeing” refers not to interpretation, but to the physical act of perception itself. The gaze is always in forever motion: roaming, sharpening. The exhibition title, Soft Eyes, is borrowed from equestrian sports, describing a peripheral gaze – broad, unfocused, yet acutely aware of its surroundings. “Soft eyes” can also suggest an emotional or infatuated look, a softened and tender way of seeing.

 

Westerberg’s painting style is minimal and gently direct, carrying an honest, incisive narrative. In his pictures, narrative is both present and absent – it hovers at the edges of the work, breathing somewhere beyond the frame. This tension lies at the heart of his practice: what is left unsaid or unseen often carries as much weight as what is revealed.

Although Westerberg’s subjects are drawn from everyday life, his works at times enter into dialogue with art history. For instance, Sofianlehto draws inspiration from a detail of Gunnar Finne’s Fact and Fable (1898), the monument to Zacharias Topelius in Helsinki’s Esplanade Park.

 

Born in 1998, ARNO WESTERBERG graduated with a bachelor’s degree in fine arts from the University of the Arts Utrecht in 2022 and completed a master’s degree at the Academy of Fine Arts in Helsinki in 2024. He has exhibited widely in Finland and internationally. His first solo shows were held in Arnhem, the Netherlands, and he has since participated in group exhibitions at venues including Collectie De Groen, the Academy of Fine Arts Master’s Degree Show in Helsinki, and Billytown in The Hague.

GALERIE FORSBLOM

Yrjönkatu 22, 00120 Helsinki

www.galerieforsblom.com

Marika Mäkelä @ Galerie Forsblom, Helsinki - "Light of the Sand" Exhibition

Marika Mäkelä: Light of the Sand

Galerie Forsblom, Helsinki

September 26 – October 26, 2025

Marika Mäkelä’s new paintings take us on a journey to places both familiar and unknown. Often, it is precisely the unknown that reveals the familiar in a new light. This exhibition is a synthesis of her experiences: influences gathered from many places merge into worlds of their own. Disparate realities intersect in her work – her paintings are like cultural melting pots, where movement and insight are distilled as images.

Marika Mäkelä has spent long periods in Spain and Morocco, and the influence of these cultures is deeply embedded in her art. Her travels have left visible traces: certain shapes, colors, and qualities of light have remained with her. Spain, for instance, has inspired her interest in angular forms, in the way shapes extend beyond the canvas, and in the contrasts and encounters between materials.

Yet two elements always lie at the heart of her paintings: light and form – their observation and dissection. Her new works reveal a recent fascination with the play of light on sand. They reflect the mutable nature of sand in shifting contexts, from desert expanses to swirling storms. Sand-inspired clusters of form and thought have also found their way into her compositions. A figurative element emerges too, articulating rhythm and carrying the narrative forward. This narrativity grows out of experiences that entwine thoughts, landscapes, places, and journeys – finally crystallizing in Mäkelä’s mind in the form of a painting.

Marika Mäkelä (b. 1947) is one of Finland’s most eminent painters. In a career spanning six decades, she has received many of the nation’s highest artistic honors, including the State Prize, the Pro Finlandia Medal, and the title of Commander of the Order of the Lion of Finland. In 2024, the President of the Republic of Finland awarded her the honorary title of professor. Marika Mäkelä’s works are represented in major international museums, including Moderna Museet in Stockholm, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Oslo, and Kiasma, Museum of Contemporary Art in Helsinki.

GALERIE FORSBLOM

Yrjönkatu 22, 00120 Helsinki

www.galerieforsblom.com

Harri Koskinen @ Galerie Forsblom, Helsinki - "Magnitude" Exhibition

Harri Koskinen: Magnitude

Galerie Forsblom, Helsinki 

August 22 – September 21, 2025

 

Harri Koskinen one of Finland’s most renowned designers, presents a new exhibition shaped by compelling, multi-layered themes that navigate borderlands between the mythical and the contemporary. Elements subtly reminiscent of survival gear suggest preparation for an uncertain future, serving as a quiet reminder of today’s volatile global climate. At the same time, the exhibition drifts into the realm of myth and adventure. Rather than creating ominous imagery, Harri Koskinen explores the delicate tension between the material form and conceptual depth of his work.

The exhibition presents a selection of unique glass sculptures, both free-blown and mold-cast. Glass, with its reactive sensitivity, naturally lends itself to the creation of multi-layered forms. As a material born from the transformation of sand through intense heat, then cooled into solid form, glass inherently embodies shifting states of matter. Koskinen’s minimalist visual vocabulary resonates beautifully with the fragility of his medium. Most of the featured sculptures were handcrafted at the historic glassworks in Iittala and Riihimäki, with select pieces produced in Switzerland. This marks Koskinen’s fifth solo exhibition at Galerie Forsblom.

HARRI KOSKINEN (b. 1970), is a highly versatile designer known for his conceptual approach. His practice spans both serial production and one-offs. Over the course of his distinguished career, he has served as design director at Iittala and collaborated with prestigious international brands including Artek, Genelec, Hermès, Issey Miyake, Muu, and Svenskt Tenn. Among his many accolades are the Torsten and Wanja Söderberg Prize, the Compasso d’Oro Award, and the Pro Finlandia Medal. Harri Koskinen lives and works in Espoo and Helsinki.

GALERIE FORSBLOM

Yrjönkatu 22, 00120 Helsinki

www.galerieforsblom.com

Marjatta Tapiola @ Galerie Forsblom, Helsinki - "Metamorphoses" Exhibition of Paintings

Marjatta Tapiola: Metamorphoses

Galerie Forsblom, Helsinki 

June 6 – August 17, 2025

Marjatta Tapiola often takes inspiration for her paintings from literature, from sources such as the Greek Minotaur myth or the work of the Russian poet Anna Akhmatova. Rather than depicting these venerable literary sources literally, she uses them as a vehicle for dealing with themes such as the brutality of life and what it means to be human, exploring emotions, hopes and experiences familiar to everyone.

The exhibition provides a review of Tapiola’s recent oil paintings and works on paper, this time drawing inspiration from selected extracts of poetry by the German-born writer W.G. Sebald (1944-2001) and Autobiography of Red (1998) by the Canadian novelist Anne Carson (b. 1950). Foremost among Tapiola’s sources of literary inspiration are the epic myths of Metamorphoses originally published in Latin by the Roman poet Ovid (43 BCE-18 CE). The classic magnum opus is said to contain almost everything ever written in subsequent literature.

Ovid’s imaginative, sometimes tragic and sometimes humorous tales have inspired countless artists ever since Classical Antiquity and the Renaissance. Marjatta Tapiola is a contemporary artist who interprets Ovid’s powerful verses from her own personal point of view. The task has been a challenging one, and the results are surprising, as always – even to those already familiar with Tapiola’s art. Sebald and Carson both draw on art history and ancient mythology, and their evocatively visual writing has provided Tapiola with fresh inspiration in her exploration of new visual frontiers.

Marjatta Tapiola (b. 1951) ranks among the leading Finnish painters of her generation. Among the many accolades she has received are the Pro Finlandia Medal, the Finnish Cultural Foundation Award in 2004, and the State Prize for Fine Arts in 2006. Her work is held in the Ateneum Art Museum, the Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma, and numerous other major public collections in Finland. Marjatta Tapiola is also an acclaimed portraitist.

GALERIE FORSBLOM, HELSINKI

Lönnrotinkatu 5, 00120 Helsinki
www.galerieforsblom.com

Jussi Goman @ Helsinky Contemporary - "Desire Path" Exhibition

Jussi Goman: Desire Path

Helsinki Contemporary

August 8 - 31, 2025

Jussi Goman

Desire Path, 2025

Acrylic on canvas, 200 cm x 180 cm

Photo Jussi Tiainen

© Jussi Goman. Courtesy Helsinki Contemprary

Jussi Goman

Where I Wasn't Going, 2025

Acrylic on canvas, 200 cm x 180 cm

Photo Jussi Tiainen

© Jussi Goman. Courtesy Helsinki Contemprary

Jussi Goman

Shown Twice, 2024 

Acrylic on canvas, 200 cm x 150 cm

Photo: Jussi Tiainen

© Jussi Goman. Courtesy Helsinki Contemprary

Jussi Goman’s new paintings feature colour-drenched layers of paint that carve out unruly paths upon an orderly configuration of grids and lines. The resultant pattern is reminiscent of doodles in a graph notebook, a jigsaw puzzle, a Snake video game, or the Minotaur’s labyrinth, invoking spontaneous shortcuts, dead ends, and myriad narratives.

Jussi Goman (b. 1980) is in a class of his own in his command of colour and technique. His paintings are complex tapestries of lightness and heaviness, bold brushstrokes and delicate details. His new paintings combine dazzling, luminous hues with pastel blues and lavenders, with added accents of muted orange and red. The glassy acrylic surface provides a lively accompaniment to the lusciously textured brushwork. Adding further three-dimensionality to each canvas are the succulent acrylic impasto accents that have become a signature trademark of his style.

Jussi Goman

Runner, 2025 

Acrylic on canvas, 80 cm x 70 cm

Photo: Jussi Tiainen

© Jussi Goman. Courtesy Helsinki Contemprary

Jussi Goman

Monolith, 2025 

Acrylic on canvas, 170 cm x 145 cm

Photo: Jussi Tiainen

© Jussi Goman. Courtesy Helsinki Contemprary

Jussi Goman

Meanwhile Elsewhere, 2025 

Acrylic on canvas, 145 cm x 170 cm

Photo: Jussi Tiainen

© Jussi Goman. Courtesy Helsinki Contemprary

Jussi Goman

Gathering, 2025 

Acrylic on canvas, 145 cm x 170 cm

Photo: Jussi Tiainen

© Jussi Goman. Courtesy Helsinki Contemprary

Jussi Goman draws inspiration both from mythology and everyday life. The creatures appearing in his compositions are reminiscent of the mischievous beasts in Aesop’s animal fables, beloved pets, or birds foraging in the garden. Whichever the case may be, the underlying idea is the same: greatness comes in small details, and every moment contains eternity. After all, the ancient Egyptians worshipped the sacred scarab, the lowly beetle that spends its day rolling balls of dung. Often it is the case that something we find instantly recognisable or makes us smile contains something deep and true within it. Guided by his intuition, the artist explores this territory, following an idiosyncratic path towards a goal that is initially unknown.

A shortcut, whether taken by a human or animal, is typically an unplanned path that represents the shortest or most convenient route between an origin and destination. There is a more poetic English term for a shortcut: ‘desire path’, which perfectly captures the way shortcuts are born: the best and most enduring paths are born out of desire, not by force.

‘Desire Path’ is Jussi Goman’s first solo exhibition at Helsinki Contemporary. He has previously appeared at Helsinki Contemporary together with Santeri Lehto and Anton Alvarez in the group exhibition ‘Not Enough Room to Swing a Cat’ (Post with a biography of Jussi Goman)

HELSINKI CONTEMPORARY

Bulevardi 10 - 00120 Helsinki

helsinkicontemporary.com

Steina: Playback @ Buffalo AKG Art Museum

Steina: Playback 

Buffalo AKG Art Museum

Through June 30, 2025 

Steina: Playback surveys the work of pathbreaking media artist Steina Vasulka (Icelandic, active in the United States, born 1940) whose career traverses video, performance, and installation. Since cofounding The Kitchen in New York City in 1971, Steina has created works shaped by her experimental approach to electronic processing tools, persistent explorations of what she called “machine vision,” and an enduring ethos of play. A classically trained violinist, Steina took up video in 1970, bringing to her new instrument—initially a Sony Portapak—a musician’s attention to the “majestic flow of time.” Unlike many of her peers working in video in its early decades, the Iceland-born artist did not consider television culture in the United States as a central force against which her video activity was defined. Instead, human perception was a key site of confrontation as she sought the exuberant and even utopian possibilities of an “intelligent, yet not human vision.”

Steina also shaped the avant-garde media arts environment that characterized Buffalo in the 1970s. Steina: Playback represents a homecoming for the artist, who taught at the Center for Media Study, SUNY at Buffalo for the majority of that decade, and exhibited at the 1978 Albright-Knox Art Gallery exhibition, The VASULKAS / Steina: Machine Vision, Woody: Descriptions.

With more than a dozen single-channel works and multi-channel environments, this focused retrospective surveys Steina’s fearless DIY approach to new media and her pioneering synthesis of the electronic and the natural. While Steina’s early collaborative works with her life partner Woody Vasulka centered largely around the pair’s obsession with video’s signal and the custom-designed hardware that could distort and manipulate it, her independent works from 1975 onward probe the limits of human perspective and pursue non-anthropocentric modes of visualizing the natural world.

“This exhibition not only offers a revolutionary new view of Steina’s work, but it serves as a compelling reminder of the depth and richness of the media arts environment in Buffalo more broadly,” said Helga Christoffersen, Curator-at-Large and Curator of the Nordic Art and Culture Initiative at the Buffalo AKG Art Museum. “Steina was a key figure in the arts community in Buffalo in the 1970s and the breadth of her influence is evident in this immersive, evocative exhibition.”

Throughout her career, her works were continually shaped by her shifting environments: from downtown New York’s avant-garde and Buffalo’s experimental media arts scene of the 1970s, to the vast landscapes of New Mexico and Iceland. In her works from the 1990s onward, new projection technologies allowed her video environments to become even more immersive: flows of river, waves, light, and wind spatialize what the human eye cannot see and seem to offer analogues to the electronic flow of video and audio signals. With her distinctive translation of musical modes, like polyphony, into the visual realm and her effort to exceed human perception, Steina reveals an electronic sublime and attunes us to the vibrant, invisible energies inherent to both video and natural phenomena.

STEINA - BIOGRAPHY

Steina, born Steinunn Briem Bjarnadottir, in Iceland in 1940, lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico. She trained as a violinist in Reykjavik and Prague, and she emigrated to New York City in 1965 with her life partner Woody Vasulka. Initially working as a freelance musician, she began to focus on video in 1970 and, in 1971, cofounded The Electronic Kitchen (later The Kitchen), the legendary alternative art space in New York City. After moving to Buffalo in 1973, Steina helped develop the production lab at the Center for Media Study at SUNY Buffalo. She moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico in 1980 where she has lived and worked ever since. Steina has exhibited at leading institutions internationally, including the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Museum of Art, Carnegie Institute, Pittsburgh (now the Carnegie Museum of Art); San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, among others. Important collections with her work include the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Smithsonian American Art Museum; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Julia Stoschek Foundation; Tate, London; Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary; and ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe. Awards and grants include: Rockefeller Foundation and NEA grants (1982); the Maya Deren Award (1992); the Siemens Media Arts Prize from ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe, Germany (1995); as well as an honorary doctorate from the San Francisco Art Institute (1998).

STEINA

MIT List Visual Arts Center, MIT Press, 

and Buffalo AKG Art Museum, 2025

238 pp., Hardcover, 8 1/4 x 12 1/4 in.

ISBN: 978-0262551625

Accompanying the exhibition at MIT List Visual Arts Center and the Buffalo AKG Art Museum is the new monograph, Steina, which brings renewed recognition to the artist, tracing her oeuvre from early collaborative works with her partner Woody Vasulka to her independent explorations of optics and a liberated, non-anthropocentric subjectivity. The book is the first comprehensive monograph on the pioneering video artist in more than a decade. Contributors include scholars Gloria Sutton, Joey Heinen, and Ina Blom, who consider how Steina's generative sense of play gave way to methods of processing and computation; contextualize Steina alongside a group of her peers who shared an obsession with the electronic signal; and argue for her interest in video as a proto-virtual space. 

Steina: Playback is organized by MIT List Visual Arts Center in collaboration with the Buffalo AKG Art Museum and is curated by Natalie Bell, Curator, MIT List Visual Arts Center and Helga Christoffersen Curator-at-Large and Curator, Nordic Art and Culture Initiative, Buffalo AKG Art Museum. 

BUFFALO AKG ART MUSEUM

1285 Elmwood Avenue, Buffalo, New York 14222

buffaloakg.org

Steina: Playback @ Buffalo AKG Art Museum, March 14 - June 30, 2025

Martin Wickström @ Galerie Forsblom - "Tänd dina eldar" Exhibition

Martin Wickström

Tänd dina eldar

Galerie Forsblom, Helsinki 

May 5 – June 1, 2025

Martin Wickström’s (b. 1957) art is situated at the intersection between past and present, private and collective. His kaleidoscopic imagery juxtaposes unexpected elements: arctic avens in timeless alpine scenery appear side by side with barrel fires in 1980s Harlem, and American Pop Art emblems are interspersed among wistful childhood memories of growing up in the safe arms of Sweden’s folkhemmet during the 1960s. Martin Wickström mixes disparate decades and geographies, intermixing images of the French Alps with scenes from the United States, Sweden and Kyoto. His paintings engage in close scrutiny of quotidian drama wherever it unfolds, whether in family dynamics or in the international political arena.

Martin Wickström combines a variety of elements in his work: documentary photography, everyday objects and emotional memories. He finds and highlights beauty in architecture and design. His paintings have a diary-like quality – they are like carefully assembled visual notebooks that reward the viewer with their depth and nuance. Their multidimensionality is also challenging; the non-linear narrative plays with various parallels and associations, hinting at a bigger picture behind everything. Wickström’s paintings are characterized by their photorealistic precision and rootedness in tangible reality, yet they also evoke the fleeting, fragmented nature of moments that have become obscured by unreliable memories.

Martin Wickström bases his paintings on photographs, collected images and digital experimentation with various combinations before he begins to paint. He draws inspiration from everyday life and personal experiences, from everything he sees, records and feels, and from everything that is happening around him in the world. His guiding motto is the text found on French road signs at the entrance of tunnels: “allumez vos feux,” or “turn on your lights,” which the artist poetically interprets as a call to action.

Martin Wickström studied at the Gerlesborg School of Fine Art and the Royal Swedish Academy of Fine Arts in Stockholm. He has exhibited widely around the world and his work is held in many prestigious collections, including Moderna Museet, EMMA – Espoo Museum of Modern Art and the art museums of Gothenburg, Skövde and Norrköping.

GALERIE FORSBLOM

Yrjönkatu 22, 00120 Helsinki

www.galerieforsblom.com

Lars-Gunnar Nordström: Centenary @ Galerie Forsblom, Helsinki - A pioneer of Finnish post-war abstract art

Lars-Gunnar Nordström: Centenary

Galerie Forsblom, Helsinki 

August 23 – September 22, 2024 

This year marks the 100th anniversary of the birth of Lars-Gunnar Nordström (1924–2014), a pioneer of Finnish post-war abstract art. To mark the occasion of the centenary, Galerie Forsblom takes pride in presenting an exhibition spanning many decades of his career. Lars-Gunnar Nordström’s paintings and sculptures celebrate the universal properties of form, color and line, fusing these elements in meticulously planned order and carefully orchestrated harmonies. His compositions are distinctive for their dynamism, precision, and perfect command of color. His visual lexicon has the immaculate equilibrium of a mathematical formula. The mathematical character of his compositions also finds expression in their inherent spatiality, which stands as a distinctive hallmark of Lars-Gunnar Nordström’s highly recognizable Concretist painting style.

Lars-Gunnar Nordström achieved acclaim in the Nordic region not only as an artist but also as an influential art world figure, teacher, and writer. Prior to becoming an artist, Lars-Gunnar Nordström studied furniture design and dreamed of becoming an architect. Even after he became a painter and sculptor, he occasionally designed furniture and stage sets and did graphic designs for print.

The exhibition is a collaboration with the L-G Nordström Foundation.

GALERIE FORSBLOM

Yrjönkatu 22, 00120 Helsinki 

www.galerieforsblom.com

After the Sun—Forecasts from the North @ Buffalo AKG Art Museum + Gammel Strand, Copenhagen

After the Sun—Forecasts from the North

Buffalo AKG Art Museum

April 26 - August 19, 2024

The Buffalo AKG Art Museum presents After the Sun—Forecasts from the North, a new exhibition that surveys a generational response to the precarious state of our natural environment. Organized by Helga Christoffersen, Curator-at-Large and Curator of the Nordic Art & Culture Initiative at the Buffalo AKG, After the Sun is on view in the new Jeffrey E. Gundlach Building, after which it will travel to Gammel Strand in Copenhagen, Denmark.

Featuring the work of twenty artists with strong ties to Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden, After the Sun considers how emergencies at a Northern latitude reverberate globally. The exhibition presents new artistic engagements that build on the Nordic region’s tradition of depicting the natural world, and asks what art is generated in response to the intensifying global climate crisis.

“As the inaugural exhibition of the Nordic Art & Culture Initiative at the Buffalo AKG, After the Sun is a fitting example of the prescient, global projects that define the Buffalo AKG,” said Janne Sirén, Peggy Pierce Elvin Director. “The Nordic Art & Culture Initiative creates an unprecedented international platform for new art and pressing subject matter. We are honored to present After the Sun and to partner with Gammel Strand in Copenhagen to extend the exhibition’s reach across the Atlantic.”

Cathleen Chaffee, Charles Balbach Chief Curator, observed, “This remarkable exhibition envisions the scope of our vulnerability as a species, as we navigate an existence that is increasingly, consistently in extremis. Encompassing artists who approach the pressing subject of climate change from vastly different perspectives, it is a case study for the ways artists can help us see otherwise opaque aspects of life in a time of natural and manmade crises.”

The exhibition’s title is drawn from Danish writer Jonas Eika’s collection of short stories Efter Solen (After the Sun), winner of the Nordic Literature Prize in 2019. Eike has said that the book emerged from a sense of personal and political exhaustion, a feeling that he believes is shared by many: “That the way we imagine the future is mostly just a continuation of what there is today. The future, as a potential for change and a source of political energy, seems to be missing.” 

As Eika’s book addresses the profound challenge of responding to forces that pull us apart, the artists included in After the Sun grapple with how artistic practice may or may not succeed at meaningfully shaping the future world.

Occupying the entire first floor of the Buffalo AKG’s new Jeffrey E. Gundlach Building’s special exhibition galleries along with outdoor space on the museum campus, After the Sun presents artistic responses to the climate crisis that range from the analytical to the speculative, the poetic to the political. Some artists consider the repercussions of temporary solutions to climate change, among them Lea Porsager (born Frederikssund, Denmark, 1981, lives in Copenhagen, Denmark), in whose hands a sequence of massive disused windmill blade fragments become poignant ruins. Amitai Romm’s (born Jerusalem, 1985, lives in Copenhagen, Denmark) slight but throbbing sculptures and sound work are among several in the exhibition to approach science and data related to the environment from a visceral, embodied position. Olof Marsja’s (born Gällivare, Lapland, Sweden, 1986, lives in Gothenburg, Sweden) plant-human hybrid sculptures are contemporary guardian figures, related to indigenous knowledge and the artist’s own Sámi tradition. These, and all the artists in After the Sun explore what a meaningful engagement with nature might mean today and how we might forge practical, theoretical, and metaphysical paths forward.

Participating Artists

Sigurður Ámundason (b. 1986, Reykjavik, lives in Reykjavik, Iceland),  

Felipe de Ávila Franco (b. 1982, Belo Horizonte, Brazil, lives in Helsinki, Finland), 

Á. Birna Björnsdóttir (b. 1990, Reykjavik, lives in Amsterdam, The Netherlands), 

Ragna Bley (b. 1986, Uppsala, Sweden, lives in Oslo, Norway), 

Sara-Vide Ericson (b. 1983, Bollnäs, Sweden, lives in Älvkarhed, Sweden),  

Carola Grahn (b. 1982, Jåhkåmåhkke, Lapland, Sweden, lives in Malmö, Sweden), 

Alma Heikkilä (b. 1984, Pälkäne, Finland, lives in Helsinki, Finland),  

Jane Jin Kaisen (b. 1980, Jeju Island, South Korea, lives in Copenhagen, Denmark),  

Juha Pekka Matias Laakkonen (b. 1982, Helsinki, lives in Helsinki, Finland),  

Linda Lamignan (b. 1988, Stavanger, Norway, lives in Copenhagen, Denmark), 

Timimie Märak (b. 1988, Stockholm, lives in Stockholm, Sweden),  

Olof Marsja (b. 1986, Gällivare, Lapland, Sweden, lives in Gothenburg, Sweden), 

Santiago Mostyn (b. 1981, San Francisco, lives in Stockholm, Sweden),  

Lea Porsager (b. 1981, Frederikssund, Denmark, lives in Copenhagen, Denmark), 

Amitai Romm (b. 1985, Jerusalem, lives in Copenhagen, Denmark),  

Vidha Saumya (b. 1984, Patna, India, lives in Helsinki, Finland),  

Inuuteq Storch (b. 1989, Sisimiut, lives in Sisimiut, Greenland),  

Jenna Sutela (b. 1983, Turku, Finland, lives in Berlin),  

Apichaya [Piya] Wanthiang (b. 1987, Bangkok, lives in Oslo, Norway),  

Simon Daniel Tegnander Wenzel (b. 1988, Hamburg, lives in Oslo, Norway)  

After the Sun—Forecasts from the North is the inaugural exhibition of the Buffalo AKG Nordic Art & Culture Initiative. It is co-organized by the Buffalo AKG Art Museum and Gammel Strand, Copenhagen, Denmark.

The Buffalo AKG Nordic Art & Culture Initiative is a unique platform in North America for art of the Nordic region in a broad sense, encompassing artists whose practices are tied to a landmass that includes Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, Sweden, the Faroe Islands, Greenland, and the Åland Islands. The Initiative is dedicated to organizing programs and exhibitions at the Buffalo AKG and in the Buffalo community with artists and cultural producers across disciplines who are substantively associated with the Nordic region. As part of the Initiative, over the next sixty years the Buffalo AKG will develop North America’s leading collection of contemporary art from the Nordic region.

BUFFALO AKG ART MUSEUM

1285 Elmwood Avenue, Buffalo, New York 14222

buffaloakg.org

Johanna Karlsson @ Galerie Forsblom, Helsinki - Scenes and Notes

Johanna Karlsson: Scenes and Notes

Galerie Forsblom, Helsinki

August 19 – September 18, 2022

Swedish artist Johanna Karlsson (b. 1968), exhibiting in Finland now for the first time, builds dioramas, hidden inside which are startlingly detailed landscape ​​studies. The artist uses copper and silver wire, paper, old newspapers, egg cartons, textiles, pigments and plaster in her artworks. She solders, shapes and paints the works. The artworks demand time from the viewer, not only from the artist. The work process is slow and requires meticulous attention to detail. The viewing experience calls for the same dedication.

Johanna Karlsson’s works inhabit the middle ground between sculpture and painting. The artist is not so much interested in colors, though, focusing more on the sculpture and letting the materials speak. Karlsson’s landscapes are not verdant, as grey, white and brown are the predominant colors. Johanna Karlsson creates precise glimpses of nature while also introducing elements with cultural context. The result is a landscape where personal interpretation blends with natural science. The artist does not highlight particular symbols or thematic tales in her natural studies, instead leaving them to the broader story of all birth and death. The landscapes are rugged, but the artist points out that the trees are not dead. They are simply waiting.

Johanna Karlsson graduated from the Royal Swedish Academy of Fine Arts in Stockholm in 1997. Karlsson’s work is found in collections such as the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, Sundsvall Museum in Sweden, and the Olbricht Collection in Germany. The artist lives and works in Stockholm.

GALERIE FORSBLOM

Yrjönkatu 22, 00120 Helsinki

www.galerieforsblom.com

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Ines Sederholm @ Galerie Forsblom, Helsinki - Coexistence

Ines Sederholm: Coexistence

Galerie Forsblom, Helsinki

6 May - 5 june 2022

Ines Sederholm (b. 1991) belongs to a younger generation of artists with a background in street art who have become established in the gallery world. Her characteristic style is illustrative with bright colors and bold graphic patterns. The exhibition at Galerie Forsblom combines Ines Sederholm's older production - now on display in Finland for the first time - with new works that originated. At the same time, the artist lived in the French Alps.

Ines Sederholm spent 2018-2020 living in Chamonix in the French Alps, where the pace of life follows the rhythm of nature. Living in an alpine village with only a few thousand inhabitants is a grounding experience but also electrifying and even perilous in extreme conditions. The works in Ines Sederholm’s new show are based on sketches from her Chamonix notebooks, which depict Chamonix’s avian community and chronicle the vicissitudes, perils, and surprises of alpine life. Her work exudes a palpable tension born of the artist’s love of the Alps and simultaneous longing to return to the dynamic pace of city life. This paradoxical state is captured by juxtaposing organic forms and natural materials with the shiny surfaces and metallic sheen of urban street art.

The Marine-themed paintings on display in the exhibition are from 2018. Ines Sederholm’s starting point was the relationship between humankind and the oceans. She illuminates the environmental problems we currently face due to human impact: the warming and acidification of the oceans, coral reef bleaching, plastic pollution, and the consequences of deep-sea oil drilling. Her work also comments on eradicating marine species, food chains, and entire ecosystems. While the paintings are thematically profound, their execution is playful and detailed. Sharp black lines meander across the surface, and various animals with curious eyes appear as melting ice floes, plastic bottles, and garbage are floating in the background. The paintings' titles are short poems and offer an idea of what the artist wishes to convey and unlock the viewer’s interpretations regarding each piece.

Ines Sederholm is supported by the Arts Promotion Center Finland.

GALERIE FORSBLOM

Yrjönkatu 22 - 00120 Helsinki

www.galerieforsblom.com

______________________

2012 Armory Show Focus: Nordic Countries with 19 galleries from Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Finland and Iceland

Armory Show, NYC, March 8-11, 2012: The Third Edition of Armory Focus to features The Nordic Countries

The mission behind ARMORY FOCUS is to shed light on a dynamic arts community. After Berlin (2010) and Latin America (2011) the third edition of Armory Focus will turn its attention to The Nordic Countries. The invitation-only component of The Armory Show, Armory Focus: The Nordic Countries, will feature select galleries from Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Finland and Iceland.

Armory Focus: The Nordic Countries will continue The Armory Show’s mission to provide an annual platform for an under recognized yet thriving arts communities at one of the most important gathering of artists, dealers and collectors in the world, The Armory Show. In recognition of the region’s increasing importance on the global art scene and its vital presence in New York City, Armory Focus: The Nordic Countries will offer a select group of galleries an opportunity to showcase their innovative and exciting exhibition programs in New York City.

Paul Morris, Founding Director of The Armory Show, notes that “The decision to focus on the Nordic Countries: Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Finland and Iceland, centered around a discussion about an important and thriving art community, yet one that is often under-represented as a region – and the Nordic region is just that. The extensive and overwhelming network of artists, curators, collectors, museums, and galleries attests to the Nordic’s international importance and we want Armory Focus to highlight the region’s contribution to the international art community."

This year, and for the first time, Armory Focus is curated by the esteemed Malmö Konsthall director, Jacob Fabricius. Fabricius will be integral in the selection of the galleries included in Armory Focus: The Nordic Countries in addition to tailoring the aesthetic look of the section. “Nordic or not, the artists and galleries that work in this region deserve our full attention and I am happy to be able to present them in New York and at The Armory Show as part of the focus on the Nordic Region."

Armory Focus: The Nordic Countries – The 19 featured Art Galleries from Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Finland and Iceland

Galerie Anhava, Helsinki
Martin Asbaek Gallery, Copenhagen
Beaver Projects, Copenhagen
Gallery Niklas Belenius, Stockholm
Galleri Bo Bjerggaard, Copenhagen
Crystal, Stockholm
D.O.R., Oslo
Dortmund Bodega, Oslo
ELASTIC, Malmö
Fruit & Flower Deli, Stockholm
i8, Reykjavik
IMO, Copenhagen
Galleri Magnus Karlsson, Stockholm
Christian Larsen, Stockholm
NOPlace, Oslo
Galleri Susanne Ottesen, Copenhagen
David Risley Gallery, Copenhagen
Galleri Christian Torp, Oslo
V1 Gallery, Copenhagen

The Armory Focus Curator: JACOB FABRICIUS

Jacob Fabricius has curated numerous exhibitions at the Malmö Konsthall since 2005 and was appointed director of this institution in 2008. As director, he initiated many innovative public exhibitions such as the hitchhiking exhibition Auto Stop and Polis Polis Potatismos. Before coming to the Malmö Konsthall, he worked as a freelance curator and associated curator at Centre d’Art Santa Monica, Barcelona. Fabricius has organized numerous exhibitions and public projects such as What is a guy from Leicester, a Swedish girl, a family father and a gay couple doing on a deserted island between Denmark and Sweden? (1997), Art Calls (1997), S-tog (1999), Rent-a-Bench (2002), Sandwiched (2003) and KBH Kunsthal (2005-06). Jacob Fabricius is also founder of the publishing company Pork Salad Press and the newspaper project Old News. He has published more than 50 books, records and CDs; most recently David Robbins’ Concrete Comedy. Jacob Fabricius lives in Copenhagen, DK and works in Malmö, SE.

2012 Armory Fair Show
March 8-11, 2012
Piers 92 & 94 - New York City - USA
Website: www.thearmoryshow.com