Those who saw Anna Tuori’s paintings when they were last exhibited at Bergen Kunsthall in 2003 will recognize her unmistakable brushwork in the beautiful and at the same time so fragile landscapes that she continues to explore and develop. This year she opens the spring exhibition season alone in NO.5 with a brand new series.
Tuori’s method is based on the idea of simultaneity. She often works with several paintings at a time, repeating various themes and motifs, but gradually, as the process goes on, letting them develop in their own right. What she thus achieves is paintings that can be experienced as related to one another: they refer back to the same point of departure, but still belong to no predetermined order – no shared or serial interpretation. Many people will see a parallel in this to the way memories and personal impressions can emerge in consciousness at the same time, and yet each seem different to us from one time to the next.
Anna Tuori’s paintings are not only inspired by the Romantic landscape tradition as we know it from Caspar David Friedrich, but are also based on the experience of art as a dialogue between work and viewer. At first glance we recognize figures and forms from the real world. On closer scrutiny we are confused by the way apparently non-representative brushstrokes distort the picture surface, allowing us to glimpse that something invisible is present – something that requires us to turn our gaze as much inward to ourselves. In this spontaneous interface between fragments of collective and individual, conscious and unconscious reference points, we discover that the landscapes can be as solitary and mysterious as they are beautiful. In this way Anna Tuori’s visual language evokes constant reversals that have the effect of renewing the viewer’s gaze, but which also – and not least – bring innovative and highly relevant expressive forms to the medium itself.
Anna Tuori lives and works in Helsinki. Her paintings have been bought by a number of institutions, and recently she has been represented at among other places Le Triage in Paris in 2004; Prague Biennale2 in 2005; Platform Contemporary Art Center in Istanbul; Galerie Anhava, Helsinki in 2006; and the Third Beijing Art Biennale in 2008.