Anne Koskinen – Familie Koskinen

Retrospective in Helsinki Art Museum Tennis Palace, Helsinki, Finland, 28 November 2008 – 25 January 2009

Foreword

Anne Koskinen’s art is both profoundly personal and saturated with a sense of sophisticated intentionality and universal sentience. Her works are composed of a broad array of qualities and thought-patterns which together form uniquely versatile conceptual and visual entities. Seemingly without exception, Koskinen handles her varying materials and tools of expression with effortless virtuosity. The essence of her art is anchored to a carefully considered system of interlocked ideas.

There are not many artists who are able to combine intellectual challenge and emotional appeal as suavely as Anne Koskinen. It is a great pleasure to present Koskinen’s first large retrospective exhibition, Anne Koskinen – Familie Koskinen, at the Helsinki City Art Museum. Her works, created during just over 10 years, deal with presence and absence, humanity’s relationship with nature, the links between identity and social patterns, and representation. They sketch the thin boundary between life and death and the tradition of art and the possibility of its personal regeneration. In other words, the questions to which contemporary art has of late focused its interest. Koskinen’s works condense these varied themes into a rare synthesis.

This exhibition catalogue supplements an earlier book, entitled The Presence of Absence (2002). Together, the books summarise Koskinen’s career to date. They also illustrate that because it incessantly reinvents itself and is ever-relevant, Koskinen’s art must be continuously reinterpreted. Leevi Haapala’s and Jonni Roos’s articles add fresh perspectives to articles written in the earlier catalogue by Timo Valjakka and Gertrud Sandqvist, published by Galerie Anhava. And yet Anne Koskinen’s art still offers ample material for new interpretations.

Anne Koskinen’s art has, for a long time, been supported and promoted by connoisseurs of contemporary art. I wish to express my gratitude to Galerie Anhava, which since 1998 has shown Koskinen’s art and has assisted in many ways in the making of the present exhibition. I also want to thank curator Jari Björklöv for making this exhibition possible. I sincerely hope that the presentation of Koskinen’s exhibition at the Helsinki City Art Museum will allow an increasing number of people to experience the intrinsically valuable sense of humanity and understanding that the works of an important artist can offer.

Janne Gallen-Kallela-Sirén

Director

Helsinki City Art Museum

Anne Koskinen – Familie Koskinen, ed. Jari Björklöv &

Sanna Hirvonen. Helsinki: Helsinki City Art Museum’s

Publications no. 105. 2008.

Read more here (in english)

Lue tästä näyttelyn esittely (suomeksi)

Läs mer här (på svenska)


Thanks to: Finnish Cultural Foundation, Arts Council of Finland

Collections: Helsinki City Art Museum, Helsinki, Finland, Kiasma, Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki, Finland, Kuntsi Museum of Modern Art, Collection Swanljung, Vaasa, Finland, Ilona Anhava, Helsinki, Finland, the artist’s collection