MG04. SPACE-SURFACE

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Pori Art Museum presents in its spring exhibition, “MG04. Space – Surface.”, the guidelines of Finnish post-war modernism and the theory-based thinking that reflects the role of pictorial surface and colour.

According to the painter and theorist Unto Pusa (1913-1973), art is a dynamic that creates its own environment. One of the most significant figures of Finnish modernism referred in his statement to the changing role of painting in the 20th century. To him painting was no longer a window opening up the reality behind the canvas, as it was for a Renaissance painter. Painting was no longer an image projected onto a two-dimensional surface from a three-dimensional world in the same sense that Albrecht Dürer had taught in his book Underweysung der Messung in 1525. According to Pusa’s way of thinking the painter should study the elements of the pictorial surface and their relationships with the aim of finding a universal and independent language.

Timo Valjakka wrote in 1982 about Pekka Ryynänen’s art: “Painting advances according to its own conformities, synthesis and contrasts towards its own completion. An artist must remain faithful to his original concept- if that is lost, there will be no work of art at all.”

The MG04. Space – Surface exhibition examines the role of modernism and the thinking represented by Pusa in Finnish post-war fine art, and the collection of Maire Gullichsen Art Foundation’s role in Finnish fine arts and modern culture. Based on late Cubism and the concretism of the late 1950’s, the exhibition opens up in various directions ending with the colour theoretical questions of the Free Art School at the end of the 1970’s and beginning of the following decade. As well as Unto Pusa’s work, the exhibition presents works by Per Stenius, Sam Vanni, Juhana Blomstedt, Carolus Enckell, Tor Arne and Pekka Ryynänen. In addition, the exhibition includes the works from the Collection of Maire Gullichsen Art Foundation, and two works from the museum’s other collections.