Sommartider – Turku Artists’ Associations 100th anniversary exhibition

The association is celebrating its anniversary in worthy company, and with good reason, as 1924, the year the guild was born, was also marked by another major project in Finnish culture: Jean Sibelius’ Seventh Symphony.

Geniuses miss each other, but at the beginning of our country’s independence, the musical giant who had just arrived at Tuusulanjärvi was hardly thinking of Turku. To make this possible, it took Europe’s crazy year of 1968 and the architect Woldemar Baeckman. The Sibelius Museum’s acoustically refined concrete brutalism building had its grand opening that year.

The heart of the museum, the Sibelius Hall, offers a fascinating and fitting environment for visual art, supporting the modernist forms; a space too rarely used. The robust concrete walls and acoustically designed multi-polar forms break one of the main paradigms of the exhibition of abstract art, the white cube, and allow for a whole new way of seeing and experiencing visual art. The French mounting style of Parisian salon art is broken up by the silence of the empty space. “Pianissimo”, Sibelius would have said.

This cavalcade of 38 artists is made up of voluntary contributions from members of the Artists’ association, selected not by a curator but by a jury, characteristic of Parisian salon art. An important structure, because a century of friendship is worth celebrating in a way that respects tradition. And why not also celebrate summer, since we have been granted one.

The exhibition contains works from the following artists:

Aaltonen Vesa
Aho Anna
Aihinen Riikka
Giger Reeta
Haanpää Markku
Hakanen Jukka
Halmesmaa Anu
Hautamäki Toni
Hedberg Sini-Meri
Holma Marjatta
Immonen Kati
Isaksson Kristina
Kallio Petra
Kananoja Sanna
Kiviniemi Ville
Kuivisto Lena
Leka Lotta
Metsämäki Mari
Mutka Jone
Määttälä Eliisa
Oikkonen Tuuli
Pitkänen Kalle
Puhakka Arja Maarit
Pylkkö Leena
Raatikainen Samu
Rantanen Jarkko
Ruohonen Elina
Ruusulaakso-Norima Helena
Salmi Sinikka
Sinkkonen Johanna
Suominen Paula
Torvinen Sari
Tuominen Henri
Vainio Tiina
Vanhanen Heini
Vierikko Paula
Vuorio Susanna
Ylitalo Merja