Alvar Gullichsen: COSMOS 8.12.2023–19.5.2024
Press release 27.11.2023
Alvar Gullichsen: COSMOS
8.12.2023–19.5.2024
Ars Nova, floors 1 and 2
Alvar Gullichsen (b. 1961, Helsinki) is an established artist, musician and producer. For the past ten years, he has focused on painting geometric spatial paintings. Gullichsen’s art gradually started becoming abstract from 2002 onwards, when he was artist-in-residence at Villa Karo in Benin, West Africa.
Gullichsen traces transcultural, universal forms. He sees many similarities between different cultures and eras. His take on modernism is visionary, with an open-minded interest in esotericism, transcendental philosophy, mysticism and spiritual traditions.
Gullichsen’s works are a continuation of modernist abstract art, where ideal forms are the standard. He is interested in patterns repeating in the world. Such images have been approached from many directions in the visual arts: for example, Jungian archetypes have referred to images with a shared unconscious meaning. In abstract art, basic forms and composition often form a kind of symbolic language.
Both pop art and abstract art strongly challenge the concept of artists’ individualism. Gullichsen’s approach to art is ecstatic: he channels or mixes various forms while filtering his own and the collective cultural background. “The starting point for a painting is a vision of some archetypal visual language that seems to carry with it a message or a teaching, a type of aesthetic ideal,” Gullichsen says. These visions, implemented with hyperprecision, are also challenging for the viewer. They force the viewer to surrender as if in the presence of some inevitable truth.
Cosmos aims to depict the simultaneity, the unity, of both the common and the individual. The relationship between the universal and the particular is problematic in many ways if one thinks that patterns and forms can be owned. In Gullichsen’s paintings, perhaps, the patterns rather wander in and through the images.
Spanning two floors of the Aboa Vetus Ars Nova museum, the exhibition provides an exceptionally extensive overview of Gullichsen’s artistic production and contains more than 70 works. The exhibition includes early cartoon-like paintings and fibreglass sculptures, as well as sketch-like gouache paintings from his time as artist-in residence at Villa Karo in the early 2000s. The large-scale geometric paintings from the 2010s and GNARS sculptures* form an extensive ensemble. In the exhibition, humorous and more serious works are juxtaposed in an eclectic fashion. At the heart of his latest Dissolving Patterns series is the necessity for change. In these paintings, the artist dismantles his previous style and allows hard-edged geometric forms to dissolve into the landscape.
Gullichsen made his artistic breakthrough with his first exhibition Raba Hiff Show 89, which featured the machines of the fictitious Bonk Business Inc. In the ten years that followed, he continued to work on Bonk with his team** and created humorous cartoon-like paintings. Posankka (1999)***, a monumental sculpture created towards the end of the Bonk period, is by far his best-known and most beloved work. At the turn of the millennium, Gullichsen joined the artist collective ROR (Revolutions on Request), through which he participated in creating the 2001 Utopia exhibition at Kiasma. ROR was rock and pop culture, crafts and psychedelia, and strongly opposed to the prevailing belief in technology and economics.
Gullichsen graduated as a painter from the Academy of Fine Arts in 1988. He is active in several art and music collectives: ROR – Revolutions on Request (1999–), GNARS Gullichsen-Nyqvist Art Systems (2013–) Groovy Eldorado Ensemble (2002–2009), Afrojazz Club (2013–) and Afrojazz Quintet (2015–).
His works are in the art collections of several museums and foundations, including the National Gallery Kiasma, Amos Andersson, Saastamoinen Foundation, Heino Art Foundation, Svenska Kulturfonden and Stiftelsen Pro Artibus. His works can also be found in the collections of several cities, such as HAM City of Helsinki, Espoo, Oulu, Turku, Pori and Salo. Various private collections also include Gullichsen’s art, which is passionately collected.
In 1994, the Bonk Dynamo Centre (now the Bonk Museum) was founded in Uusikaupunki. Public works have been created in Helsinki (LeBonk Music Machine, 2010, and a mural in Underbar, now Pataässä, Yeah Baby Yeah, 2006), in Noormarkku (Ukk’ram, 2015) and Turku (Posankka, 1999).
*GNARS (Gullichsen-Nyqvist Art Systems) is a joint project between Gullichsen and Klaus Nyqvist to create geometric sculptures and public works.
**The Bonk project involved Richard Stanley, Henrik Helpiö, Magnus Weckström, Magnus Scharmanoff and Olli Lehtinen.
***Posankka and other fibreglass sculptures were created by Bjarne Ölander (Fibresin). Estonian sculptor Matti Varik sculpted the originals in clay from Gullichsen’s drawings.
More information:
Niina Tanskanen
curator
niina.tanskanen@avan.fi
040 585 4499
Alvar Gullichsen
alvar.gullichsen@gmail.com
