SILENT WATCH: CONTEMPORARY PRINTS FROM

A collaboration between IPCNY and a team of Finnish curators led by Juliette Kennedy, University of : Leena Ahtola-Moorhouse, Chief Curator of Exhibitions, Ateneum Art Museum, and Päivi Talasmaa, Chief Curator, Museum of Modern Art (EMMA)

INTERNATIONAL PRINT CENTER NEW YORK 508 West 26th Street, Rm 5A • New York, New York, 10001 • www.ipcny.org Silent Watch: Curatorial Essay by Leena Ahtola-Moorhouse, Juliette Kennedy and Päivi Talasmaa with partial translation by Patrik Söderlund

The exhibition attempts to survey the contemporary scene in Finnish printmaking – an unfulfillable idea, perhaps, given the richness of the scene, but hopefully still useful asa guiding principle. As with many surveys, the viewer looking for unification will rather have to settle for an irrevocably diverse collection of works – one finds here a very wide range of intentions, methods, culture and background in a group of eleven artists ranging from senior, very established figures, to artists in mid-career, to student prodigies.

And while the high level of printmaking in Finland is due in no small part to the group of painters and sculptors whose graphic work supplements their main activity – works which could form an exhibition in themselves – here we emphasize artists who are primarily printmakers.

Much of the work shown in Silent Watch is figurative, reflecting a curatorial decision to sidestep the important but dominating tradition of Finnish constructivism, one which has expressed itself in, by now, multiple generations of Finnish painters and sculptors.

This means that a number of Finnish motifs are straightforwardly visible: the complex, but ultimately romantic connection to a nature which blossoms for a few short months in summer, but is otherwise a harsh and often inhospitable presence in Finnish life; psychological realism (vis the work of Markus Lampinen); political engagement; the appropriation of historic imagery and vernacular (in the work of the collective IC-98); dream and mythic imagery (in the work of Outi Heiskanen); the “outsider” (in the work of Pauli Parkkinen).

Outi Heiskanen (b. 1937) is the most renowned of the group. She was awarded the honorific title of Academic by the Ministry of Culture and Education in Finland, via its Central Committee of Arts, in 2004 – the first time a printmaker has been given the honor. Heiskanen’s artistic dimensions embrace perfor- mance, installation, environmental art, monumental art, set design, painting, sculpture and literature. An integral part of Heiskanen’s practice involves collaborating with other artists.

Outi Heiskanen, Scorpion, 1978, Etching. As the daughter of a veterinarian and a mother with artistic aspirations, drawing and visual expression came naturally to Heiskanen. She first studied to become a teacher of visual art (graduating in 1959), working as a teacher for many years before commiting herself to art full-time. An important teacher was Pentti Kaskipuro (1930-2010), whom, even today, Heiskanen praises as her master.

Her breakthrough as an artist occurred in the 1970s, when her collective performances with the group Record Singers took place. Heiskanen traveled extensively and became interested especially in the India of her mother’s family of missionaries, in Buddhist art and in the artistic expression of Mongolian nomads. These travels have had an important influence on her work, strengthening Heiskanen’s wide world view in which cultures, humans and animals encounter each other as equals.

With very few exceptions, Outi Heiskanen’s printmaking is based on intaglio techniques. Typically she combines drypoint and aquatint with line etching, sometimes working with multiple plates – for example, in this exhibition in the works Necklace II and Salon. The earliest work, Scorpion, is purely based on line. A passionate player of solitaire, she often incorporates the world of games into her prints – for example a chessboard draws the print Paradox together.

From the beginning, Heiskanen’s subject matter has been inspired either by family members and friends, or interesting people or animals. Many works deal with dreams and contain hybrids of animals and humans. Heiskanen’s world is multifaceted, with references to both the amoebic creatures of the primeval sea, and the heavens to which man strives to ascend. Her ethos of tolerance sings also of the understanding of the relativity of human life in relation to creation as a whole.

IC-98, Little Adding Machine for Theses on the Body Politic (In the Labyrinth), 2008/2010, Set of two sliding puzzle tables with set of 29 digital prints.

The collectiveIC-98 (originally ‘Iconoclast’, founded in 1998), representing the next generation, consists of two mid-career artists: Patrik Söderlund and Visa Suonpää. The work, located somewhere near the intersection of social theory and artmaking, is equally conceptual, archival, philosophical, and opulently visual. It is manifested in the form of prints, animations, installations and books. Not as much a body of artwork as a series of enigmas and interventions devised for us, both individually and as members of the “body politic,” IC-98 is a world unto itself.

IC-98’s visual vocabulary borrows heavily from the vernacular of 19th-century technical illustration, so that, strangely enough, a kind of elegant, highly articulated malaise hovers around the work, similar to what one might associate with the work of Edward Gorey – though what is expressed in the IC-98 project is not so much a nostalgia for the Edwardian drawing room as it is a kind of muted pathos; a longing for the pre-apocalypse. In the words of the artists:

The objectives are not programmatic, nor are the messages unequivocal – on the contrary, they are in constant movement towards the intersections of individual intuition and mutual agreements – the ideal is a free space of thought. IC-98 is interested in events which did not take place, fantastic connections between things, heresies and pure systems of thought, the presence of history in everyday life, the body politic, social formations and architectural constructions, control mechanisms and techniques of escaping them… In practice, traditional research is combined with intuitive, subjective and personal considerations. The drawings, animations and books…are…stages or stagings, tableaux vivants, a theatre where the world according to IC-98 is played out...

The ongoing series Theses on the Body Politic is an umbrella for all IC- 98’s activities. Most of the group’s interest is directed towards the ways a society of living and thinking individual bodies organizes itself. The organization always contains heterogenous and contradictory elements: power, knowledge, passions, architecture and large technological systems. IC-98 asks: How the multitude is defined, how it defines itself in action and how it is put into work? What is the relationship of individuals and groups to a larger whole, be it the state, the market, or simply architectural space? (See www.socialtoolbox.com/info.htm)

A similar sense of nostalgia haunts the work of Markus Lampinen (b. 1977, the youngest member of this group, and still a student) if not a similar, though more overt, sense of political engagement. Lampinen’s woodblock prints are produced by means of multiple layering, a technique which enables him to build toward images of depth, stillness and emotional truthfulness, for example in his portrait series, Nameless, of which two are on view here.

Markus Lampinen describes his process: “First of all one has to have an idea. I use the camera a lot. I take pictures of my ideas, either documenting an event or I can stage one. When I have a good sketch image I turn it into a woodcut. I use birch plywood and oil-based litho inks. Works from the Nameless series are really simple, they are basic woodcuts. There is only one color (black) which I have printed. Markus Lampinen, Nameless 7, 2006, Works from the March series are a little bit different. I use Woodcut. the computer to separate the tones out of the image. From these tones I make templates. All tones are printed from the same plate. So first I cut the plate, then print the first tone, then I cut the plate some more, then I print the second tone and so on. There are seven tones in theMarch series’ works.”

Juho Karjalainen (b. 1947), another senior figure here, is known as a master printmaker and experienced teacher. Karjalainen’s prints praise the omnipotence of light and man’s relation to being. Seen from afar, his new works appear to be watercolors – the aquatint technique is so fluent and water-like that the viewer has difficulty believing her own eyes, faced with a highly laborious but in the end virtuosic work, etched on one or typically two metal plates.

Juho Karjalainen’s father was a cabinetmaker, and he spent his childhood in the north of Finland, by the river in Kainuu. Today he lives in the south, in Hamina by the Gulf of Finland. Water, the open sea, light and freedom of movement are essential inspirations constituting his floating world. The imagery of Juho Karjalainen has long remained coherently classical: female nudes in different poses, landscapes, cloud formations and nowadays often nude male figures, children and beloved pets. For a long time, black and white dominated his prints. More recently he has adopted blue, red and brown in his works.

His aquatint etchings, Dark Sails and Glorious Morning, exemplify Juho Karjalainen’s delicate craftsmanship. A man’s life and a boy’s dreams reach existential dimensions in an effortless and dignified fashion. The man carries a black sail boat somewhere, his head slightly bowed; the boy, embraced by a blazing morning sun, welcomes a new morning, a big sailing ship in the background.

The young Maria Kausalainen (b. 1975) chooses her medium according to what she wants to say and to whom. Printmaking is important, along with photography, video, sculpture and painting. Kausalainen has written: Juho Karjalainen, Dark Sails, 2009, Etching. “I use the means of printmaking when printing [gravure] photos in full color – and in works the trace or gesture of which require printmaking. In my installations, everyday items and furniture are combined with photographic prints and video. My projects have dealt with family, children and the everyday – themes that I find near my own life as a mother of a big family. I am very interested in life-stories and history. In many works, I reflect the changes in society and its values.”

Born in Lapland, Maria Kausalainen has participated in numerous exhibitions, working actively in artists’ associations, all this despite her being the mother of five children. Often her subject matter has to do with the world of children, as in the polymer gravure Wanna be, on view in the exhibition – a work dealing with, among other things, the fantasy life of young girls.

Kausalainen is also known for her political works, in which indifference to others, withdrawal and the lack of a family presence are addressed. A sense of morality is present in her art, reflecting her work with immigrant children; she has photographed children in their national costumes, bringing their stories to a wider audience in their new country.

Päivikki Kallio (b. 1952) is a professor of printmaking at the Finnish Art Academy in Helsinki. Her print installations are based on various printing techniques, and have often involved images printed on stone, or a series of stones, as well as large sheets of plywood laminate – both stone and wood being canonically Finnish materials. Part of her achievement has been to expand the domain of printmaking, while at the same time to retain the integrity of the graphic medium.

Two Cities, a large ten-panel work of silk- Päivikki Kallio, Two Cities, 2010, 10 panels with silkscreen screen printed on plywood laminate, depicts on plywood, watercolor, light. the city of Königsberg in its pre- and post-World War II incarnations – two ghostly images superimposed lightly upon each other, which shimmer among the water-like patterns of the plywood. Finland’s experience of World War II remains a deep and lingering influence on Finnish life. Along with the great loss of life, there was a loss of 15% of territory to the east. Two Cities seems to speak of all of these things at once: it is a private confrontation of this loss. Kallio describes Two Cities this way:

The concrete starting point of Two Cities is first a collection of letters and photos that my mother collected from the city of Königsberg in East Prussia in the 1930s, and secondly my own photos from the city of Kaliningrad, Russia, in the year 2002. Seventy-five years separate these two sets of materials, but they are from the same city: the home of Immanuel Kant, and the center of the Enlightenment. This city is a metaphor for me; it’s paradoxical that the fate of this place came to be ruined completely as a result of big ideas in 1900 Europe. The work, 75 years of history flattened onto a transparent surface, is printed as silkscreen on very thin plywood plates. Spotlights create shadows on the other side of the printed surface. The viewer cannot tell where the images really are. The work is like a phantom image, Atlantis-like; it tells about what is lost, which lives on only in the imagination, causing phantom pain.

Emma Lappalainen’s (b. 1976) eye is on the quotidian domains of our daily life. Lappalainen’s luscious visual imagery delivers the Finnish environment to us as one of forests, lakes, rivers and small cities in a land which has sustained only a very light imprint of industrialization. The muted atmosphere that her black-and-white photopolymer prints create is one of the quiet remoteness of Finnish cities, built environments seemingly dropped into the middle of the forest, and reluctant to separate themselves from it.

Visual artist and printmaker Eeva-Liisa Isomaa (b. 1956) was born and raised in Ylitornio in Northern Finland, in Finnish Lapland. She is one of the innovators of contemporary Finnish fine art printmaking. In her work combining photography, graphics and textiles, she has experimented with methods transgressing traditional printmaking. Isomaa produces small editions and in a way plays with prints – the two book works Genesis I and Genesis II are good examples of this. The pictorial material for these works comes from Iceland, Japan and Northern Finland.

Isomaa works from photographs, printing images on thin, flossy linen and Japanese tissue (gampi), materials which she has used for a long time. Gampi is beautifully translucent. The technique is polymer gravure, a slow method – but this is the appeal of it to Isomaa, who sees herself as a craftsman when she is doing precise physical work.

Isomaa’s artistic output is related to water, landscape and time. She has been characterized as a successor Eeva-Liisa Isomaa, Genesis I and Genesis II, 1999, to the romantic tradition of 19th-century landscape Artists books: polymergravure on fabric and self- painting. The works refer to both her personal made flax and gampi paper. history and the history of the place. While visiting Iceland in 1997, she found a connection between her birthplace in Valley and the Icelandic landscape. The imaginary quality of landscape became important to her. Landscape can be likened to memory, which consists of landscape and idea. For her, landscape is a non-landscape – everywhere and nowhere: “I look at the landscape from inside, the landscape becomes thought and moment. A state of mind. I see the landscape only partially; it is infinite, all around me, but hidden at the same time. I, too, am part of it; a reflection or a shadow.”

In addition to bookworks, she has made variations of the same theme, applied computer-aided methods to fabrics, hung floating gauze fabrics in space or put a printed veil in front of a printed image. Lately she has experimented with combinations of video and printed image. The important thing is the movement and a sense of space: “… the place of the beholder is part of the landscape, too, as a shadow or a reflection in the work of art. The work contains another gaze, which comes from the outside. It is this gaze which the story of the work relies on.”

Helvetti, a book by the very interesting young artist Pauli Parkkinen (b. 1966), is one of a series of books and monotypes. Parkkinen filters the impact of popular culture through what is essentially an “outsider” stance. His is a perplexed witnessing of the onslaught of images coming into Finland from elsewhere, marking the relation of the outsider to the canonical as one of attachment, and of considerable ambivalence.

Printmaker Annu Vertanen (b. 1960) lives and works in Imatra, in Eastern Finland. Vertanen graduated as a painter, a fact visible in her print- making, which is characterized by color gradients and values. The woodblock print installation, The Day of Absence (2006-2011), is based on an aerial photograph of New York. Vertanen manipulated the image on a computer to create a graphic set of lines. The image has then been carved into birch plywood blocks and printed on gampi of different strengths and hues.

Vertanen’s works are large, spatial wholes, and the Annu Vertanen, The Day of Absence II, 2006, Woodcut. installations are site specific, the number of prints depending on the amount of space available. Prints are hung so as to recreate a unified image, very thin layers of paper revealing multiple layers of depth. The result is an installation reminiscent of textile. The title of the work comes from the everyday sensation of being in two places at the same time. Vertanen strives to depict this situation; to look at the landscape and to represent the moment of observation. For a long time she has depicted two-dimensional images in such a way as to introduce movement based on the physiology of the eye in the image. The Day of Absence gives the observer an experience bordering on the virtual. Above all, Annu Vertanen is a colorist. In her early work the colors were so dark that the works almost appeared to be mirrors. Gradually, however, she wanted to relieve the surface of heaviness and figuration – and thus began a journey toward monochromatic and light hues.

The Day of Absence II, from 2006, is a woodblock print based on a photograph. Vertanen has rasterized the photo on a computer and made an RGB color separation, which she has transferred to woodblocks and printed one color at a time on gampi. She has blurred the color separation dots to recreate a certain atmosphere – it is possible to read the work only from afar. Arabian Night, from 2005, is a woodblock print on gampi. The title comes from a flower named arabian night (dahlia). This work, too, has been printed with one plate, but using five different colors applied one by one, working the plate in between the colors. The layers of color have been printed as lightly as possible. International Print Center New York is a non-profit institution founded in 2000 to promote the appreciation and understanding of fine art prints. Through innovative programming, IPCNY fosters a climate for the enjoyment, examination and serious study of artists’ prints from the old master to the contemporary. IPCNY nurtures the growth of new audiences for the visual arts while serving the print community through exhibitions, publications, educational programs and member services.

Silent Watch is the seventh in IPCNY’s series of international exhibitions designed to foster appreciation for printed works from cultures other than our own, and is IPCNY’s first presentation of Scandinavian printmaking. With this exhibition IPCNY celebrates the rich history of Finnish printmaking by focusing on the work of eleven outstanding artists active today.

About the curators: Juliette Kennedy is Associate Professor in the Mathematics Department of the University of Helsinki. Her interest in the aesthetics of mathematical practice has led to work in curating a number of exhibitions in Europe. Leena Ahtola-Moorhouse is Chief Curator of Exhibitions at the Ateneum Art Museum, Helsinki. She has arranged exhibitions and written widely on Finnish art and architecture, with particular interest in female Finnish artists from the 19th century onwards. Päivi Talasmaa is Chief Curator at Espoo Museum of Modern Art, Espoo. She has curated numerous exhibitions of Finnish contemporary art, as well as the first major exhibition of Chinese contemporary art in Finland, among many other projects.

Support for Silent Watch has been generously provided by FRAME Finnish Fund for Art Exchange, the Consulate General of Finland, and The American-Scandinavian Foundation. A grant from the Robert Lehman Foundation supports IPCNY’s exhibitions programming. IPCNY is grateful to the New York State Council on the Arts – a State Agency, the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, and the National Endowment for the Arts for their support of the New Prints Program, and to the Deborah Loeb Brice Foundation, The Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation, The Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation, Hess Foundation, PECO Foundation, and numerous individuals for their generous annual support. IPCNY depends upon public and private donations to support its programs. To become a member, please call (212) 989-5090, or visit www.ipcny.org.

Silent Watch will be available for touring to outside venues from November, 2011. Additional exhibitions are also available through IPCNY’s Exhibitions Touring Program. Please contact [email protected] for more information.

Cover images, top to bottom: All by Emma Lappalainen. XVII from Passages Series, 2009, Photopolymer etching with chine collé, Edition: 7. XIX from Passages Series, 2010, Photopolymer etching, Edition: 4. VII from Passages Series, 2009, Photopolymer etching with chine collé, Edition: 7. All 12 1/2 x 29 inches, Printed and published by the artist. © 2011 International Print Center New York