Kemper Museum exhibit of contemporary Finnish painting looks within.
[block pos=”right”]A palpable anxiety runs through many of the works in this show.[/block]
Dark Days, Bright Nights,” an exhibit of contemporary Finnish painting at the Kemper Museum, gathers familiar vocabularies and styles, including figurative expressionism, narrative realism, stripe paintings and graffiti art.
But the spirit of this show, curated by the museum’s executive director, Barbara O’Brien, is something intriguing and different.
Although steadily gaining in global profile for its innovations in technology and bioenergy, its stellar education system and near 100 percent literacy rate, and its thriving gallery and museum scene, Finland is a country many Americans know little about. “Dark Days, Bright Nights” provides an opportunity for viewers to explore the psychological terrain of this land of lakes, forests and snow.
Finland is a young country, which emerged from its historical domination by Sweden and then Russia with the achievement of independence in 1917. After the harrowing years of World War II, when the Finns twice fought the Russians and then the Germans, Finland built a highly literate and progressive-minded society.
By most external measures, Finland today has its own house in order, and this exhibit contains little in the way of overt national self-critique. But a palpable anxiety runs through many of the works in this show.
A striking 2014 canvas by veteran painter Jarmo Mäkilä portrays angry dogs in a basement room straining to reach four young boys who tread an open grid above. Two of them act as sentinels; the other two brandish burning sticks, as a giant boy, posed on an oil drum, bangs a drum. The title, Europa, Europa, engenders a geopolitical reading that tellingly locates the source of Finnish anxiety in realities outside the country.
The proximity of Putin’s Russia and a Europe struggling to cope with terrorism—not to mention the global threat of climate change—offer Finland’s mere 5.4 million people plenty to be anxious about.
As Rauha Mäkilä once related in an interview, “I try to paint the wonderful bubble that music creates in my mind. At the same time, I am afraid some terrorist organization or rocket will burst that bubble once and for all.”
Although the exhibit’s title alludes to the diurnal conditions in which these artists work, the vagaries of light and climate are not a focus; rather, their explorations draw from within, with results ranging from dreamy to disturbing.
Rauha Mäkilä’s striking portraits head up the disturbing category. All are head and bust-length portrayals of women, most posed against pastel backgrounds. Gerli is blindfolded; Mura has no mouth. The nose-less Kamau’s face is covered by a white mask; her eyes, like Doora’s, are ringed in black. And then there is the red-headed Petite, rendered in profile with a scribbling of red paint obscuring her mouth.
In an interview at the exhibit, Mäkilä said she made the works when she was pregnant, and was thinking the world is “so scary for girls.” According to a recent study by the EU’s Fundamental Rights Agency , almost half of Finnish women experienced physical or sexual violence since age 15.
[block pos=”right”]Traps, cages, bars and enclosures are recurrent touchstones in the works on view.[/block]
There is a rawness to many of these works, coupled with an acute sense of isolation. From the attenuated black-gowned woman of Nanna Susi’s Coming-Going-Thief, to the dark personage gazing into the fantasy ice landscape of Sirpa Särkijärvi’‘s Fifth Generation, figures are usually alone, and read inevitably as surrogates for their creators.
O’Brien spent three years organizing “Dark Days, Bright Nights,” which was inspired by an encounter with the paintings of Anna Tuori at the 2012 Armory Show in New York. The exhibit includes three of Tuori’s dreamy evocations of what the artist calls “an emotional state of mind.” In the catalogue, “O’Brien compares them to “tableaux in a snow globe.”
Tuori brings a confident gestural energy to her haunting scenes, which include what she calls a “graveyard amusement park” in the 2013 painting, Splendor in the Grass. Set against a dark background, her vision seems to materialize out of the void, contained like a thought bubble.
Traps, cages, bars and enclosures are recurrent touchstones in the works on view, from the scrim-like stripes and twisting ropes overlaying an interior in Leena Nio’s Trap II (2014), to the barnacle-like extrusions that teem over a woman’s body and face in Mari Sunna’s Cage ( 2011). Both works read as commentaries on the female psyche.
Reima Nevalainen’s Between the Lines II portrays a contorted figure tangled and trapped within a series of vertical bars. The artist was recently selected as Finland’s 2016 Young Artist of the Year by Finland’s Tampere Art Museum.
The grid, as a symbol of rationalism, represents another sort of cage. Jani Hänninen’s A13, named for his parents’ address code, skews it, adding dynamism to the composition and a plea for thinking outside the rational box.
Personal, political, existential: the trapped reference is so pronounced that even abstractions, such as Heikki Marila’s pair of Excelsior stripe paintings and Mari Rantanen’s webby pattern paintings inspired by non-European sources partake in this general drift. Similarly, Marika Mäkelä’s intricately embellished talismans take on the aspect of cloaks, veils and shields.
Like Makila’s portraits, Rantanen’s abstractions all bear women’s names. Mäkelä’s shields, inspired in part by a desire to protect her daughter, reinforce a theme of female solidarity.
Amid all these paintings, Canary, a lone video by Vesa-Pekka Rannikko offers a window onto Finnish artists’ internationally recognized contributions to the genre, going back to pioneers Eija-Liisa Ahtila and Salla Tykkä.
Mountaineering ropes create a cage over the Ranniko’s projection of colorful birds, inspired he said, by the genetic manipulations of the Nazis to produce a red canary. In an interview at the exhibit Rannikko drew a parallel: “In climbing, you want to reach the peak. There is a similar ideology to producing the perfect bird.”
In the catalogue, O’Brien writes of the support she received for travel and research from various government offices and ministers, including the Ministry for Foreign Affairs and the Consulate General of Finland. Since the mid-19th century, with the founding of the country’s first art schools, art has always served as an important touchstone of Finnish national identity.
Americans who think of Eero Saarinen and Alvar Aalto as the exemplars of Finnish artistic achievement, may be surprised to learn that Finnish art enjoyed what is widely referred to as a “golden age,” from from 1870 to 1920, when artists, motivated in part by a desire to resist russification, produced iconic works celebrating the country’s landscape, history and legend.
It’s been awhile, and the dialogue has certainly shifted. Time will tell if “Dark Days, Bright Nights” gave Kansas City a ringside seat at a second Golden Age of Finnish art.
