Jan-Erik Andersson: Andersson x Ars Nova 24.2.-4.6.2023

Press release 9.2.2023

Jan-Erik Andersson: Andersson x Ars Nova
24.2.-4.6.2023
Ars Nova, 1. floor

Andersson & Ars Nova go way back! Turku-based artist Jan-Erik Andersson (b. 1954) and Aboa Vetus Ars Nova have a lot of history in common. The connection between the artist and the museum first developed in the 1980s and 1990s, a time when the museum was vigorously expanding its art collection. At the time, Andersson was a thirty-something art practitioner who was already working on Baby Retrospective (Pori Art Museum and Turku Art Museum, 1990), so as to thereafter “be free to do whatever I like”.

Andersson’s ethos is both disarming and refreshingly optimistic: “My mission is to spread positive energy, imagination, and colour, and help people communicate better. There are often serious issues beneath the ‘amusing’ surfaces of my artworks. My history as a stutterer has helped me realise how much the environment affects our enjoyment of life. Art can be of great help there!”

The late 20th century art movement known as “postmodernism” opened up Western art to diversity. It critiqued the universal ideals and grand narratives of modernism and underlined the hierarchy between fine art and popular culture. It embraced intertextuality, art historical pastiche and a playful and subjective attitude. New forms of art emerged between and alongside the traditional mediums of visual art, sculpture, and architecture, such as performance, installation, media art, conceptual art, multimedia and assemblage. Although contemporary art is a later phenomenon, only some of it can accurately be described as being “postmodern”. One might say that although postmodernism was a kind of “big bang of contemporary art”, at its core it is conceptual art founded and commenting on the history of art.

Our collection includes several of Andersson’s early assemblage sculptures made of a variety of materials, such as Goethe’s Alptraum (1989), Goethe’s Cloud (1990) and Jesus by the Edge of the Forest (1991), all of which are featured in this exhibition.

Andersson is an exceptionally wide-ranging and productive artist. His practice is a combination of intense theorising and multi-medial approach, ranging from digital video and visual art to environmental artworks. Since the 1980s, he has held exhibitions regularly, created numerous public artworks, obtained a doctorate in fine arts (2008), and designed and built two houses (Life on a Leaf, 2009, and Kuusi-o, 2023). A significant part of his practice consists of international cross-disciplinary collaborations between science and art, as well as all sorts of participatory and performative works.

Andersson has worked with digital media for nearly all of his career. He used the internet and image processing software as far back as the 1990s. His most recent works, Naval Battle on Waves 103–309 Hz and The Unanswered Question. America are both large-format collages of digital drawings. The current exhibition also features a video, The Destruction of Beauty (2011), which documents the demolition of an Art Nouveau house on Koulukatu 2 in Turku.

The exhibition includes several works by Turku-based artists, such as Otto Mäkilä, Kimmo Ojasalo, Mikko Paakkola and IC-98. Also featured is Kari Juutilainen, a close colleague of Andersson’s, with whom he has made several Edible Finns performances (together with Pertti Toikkanen).

In spite of their playfulness, the distinctive and expressive style of Andersson’s works is far from superficial. Art labelled as postmodern has proved to be more complex than originally realised. Behind the aesthetic choices lies a deep-diving, analytical approach that seeks to understand history and the spirit of place and time. The references in Andersson’s art are wide-ranging, involving motifs from philosophy, art theory, literature and architecture. Engaging in dialogue with stylistic genres, he especially likes to challenge ideals of modern art that are generally perceived to be neutral. Moreover, environmental, and ecological themes have been at the heart of his art throughout his career.

The exhibition features Andersson’s works from a period spanning almost forty years, as well as works by other artists in the collection. The Aboa Vetus & Ars Nova collection comprises around 650 works of art, with a focus on modern and contemporary art. Development of the collection has followed a postmodern “eclectic” or diverse approach. The selections for the exhibition follow the same idea, establishing variously humorous, thematic, or formal links between the works from the collection and Andersson’s works.

Although Andersson received State artist pension in 2015, he continues to work actively. In 2022, he held several exhibitions, including at the Museum of Ostrobothnia in Vaasa and Galleria Pictor in Vihti as part of Uppsala Art Museum’s Resonating Bodies exhibition, and in Söderlångvik. He is currently working on a major four-part public artwork for a new school building in Pääskyvuori, Turku, which will be completed in autumn 2023. He is also a postdoc researcher at the Academy of Fine Arts (University of the Arts, Helsinki) on the topic of the new Kuusi-o house, which he is building in Hirvensalo. Andersson is also preparing another public artwork, to be created in collaboration with students, which will be installed at the new Oxhamn school in Pietarsaari in spring 2023.

This exhibition is curated by Jan-Erik Andersson and curator Niina Tanskanen.

More information:

Niina Tanskanen
curator
040 585 4499
niina.tanskanen@avan.fi

Jan-Erik Andersson
040 501 3960
jan-erik.andersson@anderssonart.com
www.anderssonart.com