Finnish artist fashions playful works in metal

A playful exhibition by Finnish artist Maritta Nurmi entitled After the
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./.

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‘Visual diary' salutes Hanoi

As Hanoi approached its 1,000th anniversary, painter Nguyen Cam
travelled from Paris to celebrate this momentous historic
celebration of passing time with an exhibition at Art Vietnam Gallery.

All of the pieces Cam has included in the Traces of Memory exhibition are mixed media on canvas created using dark colours.

Calligraphic musings and bits of jute, votive papers, ginkgo leaves,
tea bags, and other distinctly Vietnamese elements are scattered over
fractured landscapes to give the impression of a visual diary.

All of the materials he used to create his paintings are symbolic, he
says. Ginkgo was the first tree to grow in Hiroshima after the bomb.
The plant inspires Cam as a symbol of power, vitality and eternity,
while tea bags express the changes of time.

"Everyday I
drink tea, in a silent and thoughtful space. I realised that the colours
and textures of the tea are never the same. I see it as similar to our
daily lives: each day is different," he says.

The artist
left the country for France when he was very young and he returns
with the solemn, wizened perspective of a man whose life has been pushed
and pulled, torn and mended.

"As Cam approaches the
autumn of his life, having escaped a near brush with death, a heightened
intensity and awareness of the preciousness of each and every moment is
ever present," says Suzanne Lecht, director of Art Vietnam Gallery, the
painter's close friend.

Ever mindful of the beauty of
movement, the artist methodically pursues his future, honours his past,
reveres the present, and exposes injuries accumulated along the way, she
says.

"I feel an intensified freedom when I return to
Vietnam , the country of my childhood and birth," Cam says. "Certainly
returning home, that physical place which creates the landscape and
language of our spiritual home, is life giving. It inspires me to delve
into the deep recesses of the mind and heart where a solace that helps
to face life's vagaries might be found."

The exhibition will run until November 5 at Art Vietnam Galley, 7 Nguyen Khac Nhu Street , Hanoi./.