First shown in: Anne Koskinen – Familie Koskinen, Helsinki City Art Museum Tennis Palace, Helsinki, Finland, 28 November 2008 – 25 January 2009
The paintings were painted after Peter Dreher’s series Tag um Tag guter Tag. In Umberto Eco’s terms the watercolors can be seen as reproductions while three of the oil paintings from the series Tag um Tag guter Tag (series of six paintings, two of which are Peter Dreher’s original paintings, 1996, exhibited for the first time in the exhibition Anne Koskinen – Familie Koskinen, 2008-2009) are duplicates, i.e. painted under same conditions as Peter Dreher’s original paintings and using the same glas as model.
Copies of artworks
Traditionally, originality and genuineness have been valued in art. Anne Koskinen examines and questions these values in many of her works. She is interested in the boundary separating an original from a copy: when does a copy become an independent work of art?
Tag um Tag guter Tag (‘Day by day a good day’) comprises six oil paintings, two of which were made by Anne Koskinen’s teacher, the artist Peter Dreher. One of the oil paintings is a copy of a Dreher painting by Koskinen. Koskinen also created three paintings depicting the same drinking glass portrayed in Dreher’s paintings.
The series Sculptures comprises Koskinen’s sculptural copies of other artists’ paintings. Her detailed facsimiles made from birch reveal the topography of the paintings and the details of their backgrounds: brushstrokes, wedged stretchers, pins, nails and folds in the canvas. Only the painted image is absent. She has transformed paintings made to be looked at into sculptures that appeal to the sense of touch.
Koskinen’s series Autoportraits comprises bronze-casts of her own self-portrait paintings. The original works can no longer be seen because they were destroyed in the process of making the moulds. Koskinen has burnished the surface of her bronze pieces to shine like a mirror: as a result, the works are not merely self-portraits of the artist but of each viewer, too.
Helsinki City Art Museum exhibition information, Anne Koskinen – Familie Koskinen, Helsinki City Art Museum Tennis Palace, Helsinki, Finland, 28 November 2008 – 25 January 2009. suomeksi / på svenska / in english