Kati Immonen
Flora

10.02. - 05.03.2017

KATI IMMONEN'S AQUARELLES SERVE FORREST LANDSCAPES IN DELICIOUS BITES

Kati Immonen’s third solo exhibition at Helsinki Contemporary is on February 10–March 5, 2017. In her paintings Immonen has previously dealt with topics that include war and environmental concerns. In the works in the forthcoming exhibition she packs items from the Finnish forest into baskets and wraps them with a bow, like Christmas flower arrangements – thus creating the Flora exhibition. The works of this watercolour virtuoso carry on the nature theme and comment on the way we come into contact with nature – in a neat, controlled manner. The exhibition also reminds us that, however much we want to mould and shape it, nature always hits back at some point.

“In the motifs in my works the technique is a part of the content. Watercolour painting allows me to flirt with different genres, such as illustration art. I can, as it were, illustrate things wrongly and find joy in the baggage that the medium brings with it,” Immonen says.

In the new paintings the human desire for order and control competes with a convoluted organicness that it is impossible to coerce into some easy aesthetic experience. The series of small-format paintings, Leikkimetsä (Play Forest), combines components of the Finnish forest with influences from the bonsai aesthetic. The series has its origins in the miniature worlds of the summer-cottage games of Immonen’s childhood, which were constructed using elements from the forest: pine and fir needles, cones, May lilies, moss and lichen.

HARVESTING NATURAL BEAUTY

The other body of works in the exhibition depicts human attempts to turn a wilderness into a beautiful garden. In the large, black-and-white ink and watercolour paintings in the Korpi vastaan puutarha (Wilderness Versus Garden) series the forest and garden grow on top of and in between each other. Even if the garden has vanished from view, the flora – a midsummer rose (Rosa spinosissima ‘Plena’) or an apple tree planted in some strange places – have made a home for themselves in the midst of the forest. The biggest painting in the Kasvimaa (Vegetable Garden) series fills a whole wall, as if poking fun at the miniature worlds sitting in the safety of their frames in Leikkimetsä (Play Forest).

Immonen’s artful, humorous, beautiful works urge us to reconsider our motives when encountering nature, and also remind us of nature’s indefatigable power of self-renewal.


Kati Immonen (b. 1971) graduated as an artist from Turku School of Fine Arts in 1997. Her works have been shown widely in Finland and abroad, most recently, for instance, at Rovaniemi Art Museum; Wäinö Aaltonen Museum of Art, Turku: Galleria Joella, Turku; Mältiranta Art Center, Tampere; Saarijärvi Museum; and Galerie Christian Roellin, St. Gallen, Switzerland. This summer, Immonen will have a solo exhibition in the gallery space at Café Vivan, which adjoins Amos Anderson’s former summer residence at Söderlångvik.