The Artist of the Year 2022 – Emma Jääskeläinen
At Her Fingertips
1.10.2022–29.1.2023
Sculptor Emma Jääskeläinen (b. 1988) is the 38th recipient of this nationally notable art award. She is known for her massively monumental stone sculptures that the artist makes out of classical types of stone such as granite, marble and travertine, updating the materials into the language of contemporary art. The artist avoids excessive seriousness through the use of surprising choices of material. A pocket-sized monumental sculpture illustrates well how Jääskeläinen plays with greatly varying scale: palm-fitting, huggable and impossible, as the artist herself describes it. Other opposites, such as hard and soft, are also present in the artist’s works which can also be seen as portraits in the broader sense of the term.
Corporeality is a key contentual starting point in Emma Jääskeläinen’s art. Masses are treated in a physical manner where the dialogue between the artist and the material gains a tangible form without losing its sensitivity. Grooves, marks, shadows and the weight of mass also become visible in multi-material works. Finnsheep wool, glass, a ring, a chili pod, fake fur, hair and a baseball cap are amongst the materials used by the artist. The sense of taste also becomes part of the expression through things like the use of bubble gum.
The exhibition is produced by Tampere Art Museum.
Emma Jääskeläinen. Photo: Paavo Lehtonen, 2021
Kristian Krokfors – Forever Young
1.10.2022-29.1.2023
Kristian Krokfors (b. 1952) was the first artist to receive the award in 1984, and the exhibition connected with the it opened in Tampere Art Museum in early 1985. In this Forever Young exhibition, there are works from the 1985 exhibition, but the emphasis is on paintings and graphic works produced by the artist in recent years.
Krokfors is one of those artists who polish their work into an ever more perfect form by concentrating on a specific range of subjects. He continues precisely and systematically to make graphic works, drawings and paintings of buildings, trees, cones, balloons and other objects that have become familiar during his early career. However, over the years, new subjects have appeared although the basic elements of his subject matter have remained. Krokfors’s works are at the same time both familiar and strange, real and unreal. Their subjects are representational but abstracted. The object of the depiction is concrete, but it conveys infinity. The works induce us to consider the nature of existence. It is a precisely a question of perceiving the world and its truths, as the art historian Tomi Moisio writes in the exhibition catalogue.
The exhibition is produced by Tampere Art Museum.
