End of Art Anything Goes, has opened at Art Vietnam Gallery in Hanoi.
Nurmi, a visual artist born in Finland, has been based in Hanoi since
1994 and is well-known for her installation art. Nurmi's background both
in art and in natural sciences, together with her experience of Asia,
lends her work a multilayered and multicultural feel.
The artist is famed for her richly detailed work in silver, aluminium
and copper leaf on canvas. In this playful exhibition, that combines art
and fashion, she has managed to add text to textile to accentuate her
works' effervescent surfaces.
Freed from the
constraints of making art as it is currently known, Nurmi explores all
sorts of media and objects, elevating the everyday and mundane into what
we may call the zone of the sublime.
Large round
aluminium trays used for steaming rice are suddenly transformed into
whirlpools of flora and line; small wooden stools, playfully patterned,
spring from the floor to the wall, while their corresponding tea tables
are transformed into colourful, functional artworks.
Stainless steel work tables are essays in structure and line; dragons
and Buddhas appear faintly in their mirrored surfaces, transporting the
object and the viewer into a fanciful world.
Nurmi
uses images of roses and repeats them many times in her artworks. "Rose
means everything," she explains. "I love roses and I think people do."
In the midst of all the playfulness, Nurmi takes her
ideas into yet another dimension. Inspired by the colourful textiles of
the people of Benin, in West Africa, where she was an artist in
residence in 2009, she had fabrics of her artworks made in India, which
she then transformed into her own eclectic mode of fashion – Couture
Adorable de Maritta.
Stripes and circles, angles and
lines, colour and pattern all collide into a splendid kaleidoscope of
fun and frolic, a true testimony to the function of art as art and art
as function wherein "anything goes."
"Nurmi's artworks really surprise and attract me," says Pham Trung, lecturer at the Vietnam Fine Arts University.
"She is an artist of liberalism. She breaks all old orders to create
the art of her own. However, she is influenced by Eastern philosophy and
Zen Buddhism. She stands at the border of many cultures."
Nurmi has exhibited her works in many countries including Finland, Germany, the UK, the US, Thailand, and Vietnam.
The exhibition will run until January 7 at Art Vietnam Gallery, 7 Nguyen Khac Nhu street, Hanoi./.
No comments:
Post a Comment