ANNU VERTANEN

BIOGRAPHY

Born at 1960 in Imatra, Finland

Education:
Kankaanpää Art School 1983, Lahti Polytechnic 2000

Recent one person exhibitions:
2001 "It isn't the rose", Varkaus Art Museum, Finland
2000 "Index", Gallery Forum Box, Helsinki, Finland
Dansøgade 4 Udstillning, Bövlingbjerg, Denmark
1998 Gallery G, Helsinki, Finland
1997 Gallery Rostrum, Malmö, Sweden
Gallery Sulegaarden, Assens, Danmark (with Carl Henning Aarsø)
1996 Gallery Harmonia, Jyväskylä, Finland

Selected group exhibitions:

2001 Europrint, Falutriennialen, Falun, Sweden
Tallinn Triennial, Tallinn, Estonia
Top 7, South Carelia Art Museum, Lappeenranta, Finland
Art Week, Mänttä, Finland
The Masters of Graphic Arts, VI Int. Biennial of Drawing and Graphic Arts, Györ, Hungary
Biennial de San Juan, Puerto Rico
2000 Kaliningrad Biennial of the Baltic Sea Countries, Russia
Kracov Triennial , Poland
1999 New Language, St. Petersburg, Russia
Print In Side (Graphica Creativa), Jyväskylä, Finland
Findoorcompartment, Bremen, Germany
Suitcases, Tallinn Art Hall, Estonia
International Graphic Art Exhibition, Reykjavik Art Museum, Iceland
1998 Filosofgangen 1998, Odense, Denmark
Labyrinth, Prague, Czech Republic
From Cost to Cost, Åbo konstmuseum, Finland
Save! Sveaborg, Finland
Appointments, International Community House, Kyoto, Japan
Kanakawa International Print Exhibition, Kanakawa, Japani
1997 Side Lines, Museum of University of Alberta, Canada
Contemporary Graphic Art from Finland and Sweden in Faye Weather Gallery, University of Virginia, USA Landscape, Tranås, Vetlanda ock Eksjö Museums, Sweden Upper Clouds, Myyrmäki Hall, Vantaa, Finland
1996 Post Space, Lönnström Art Museum and Gallery Otso, Finland Storgrafik, Mariefred, Sweden Sources, Sidac Studio, Leiden, Holland Pentagoni, Lappeenranta and St.Petersburg

Selected collections:

The Museum of Contemporary Art (Kiasma)Helsinki; The Parliament Collection, Helsinki; The Finnish State; The Alvar Aalto Museum, Jyväskylä; Helsinki City Art Museum; Wihuri Corporation/Rovaniemi Art Museum; Lahti Art Museum; Kuopio Art Museum; Mikkeli Art Museum; South Carelia Art Museum, Lappeenranta; Imatra Art Museum; Tampere Museum of Contemporary Art; Museum Anna Nordlander, Skellefteå, Sweden; University of Alberta Museum, Canada; Bayly Art Museum, Charlottesville, USA; Grafikens Hus, Mariefred, Sweden; National Museum in Gdansk Poland; National Museum in Banska Bystrica Slovakia; International Center of Graphic Arts Ljubljana, Slovenia; Prague National Gallery, Czech Republic;
private and corporate collections in Finland, Denmark, Holland, Germany and Japan

Grants, awards, prizes:

TheState of Finland 5-year grant 1999
ELFA Grant, Grafikens Hus, Sweden 1999
Stina Krooks Stiftelse 1997
Finnish Cultural Foundation 1996
Sasakawa Foudation 1996
Anita Snellmann Foundation 1996
Award from the Anna Nordlander Museum, Sweden 1995
The Art Committee of Kymi Province 3-year grant 1995
Kracov Triennial, Poland 1994, prize
Scholarship from the Finnish Fine Arts Association 1993
Alfred Kordelin Trust 1992
The State of Finland 1-year grant 1992
12th International Woodcut Triennial, Banska Bystrica, Slovakia 1992, grand prize
Intergrafia' 91, Katowice, Poland, grand prize
Nordisk kunst '91, Århus, Denmark, II prize
The Art Committee of Kymi Province 1-year grant 1988

Hannu Castrén, Art Critic and writer, Jyväskylä and Helsinki:

WOODCUTS BETWEEN THE SELF AND THE WORLD

The woodcut has been considered a suitable graphic technique for depicting the raw sensitivity of the Finland's spirit and its rugged nature. Moreover, the black and white woodcut, based on simple clarity of form, dominated Finnish letterpress printing up until the beginning of the 1980s, apart from certain Japanese influences. Then a change occurred that signalled a revolution in the technique.

The woodcut is the oldest graphic technique, and in international modernism it generally experienced a renaissance whenever the primitive power of emotion was sought in art instead of intellectuality. This was also the case at the beginning of the 1980s, but, at the same time, young graphic artists noticed the limited extent to which the opportunities of the technique had been used over the centuries.

In contrast to modernism, graphic art has always recognised the significance of history and that's why everything new has been created and approved in relation to tradition. This continued to be the case, but the intention was also, through renewal, to elevate the subordinate status of graphic art to stand beside the other disciplines of visual art. It is for this reason that the enlarged size, polychromaticism and picturesque qualities of works have been perceived as a reaction to two different trends: the woodcut tradition and the unwritten hierarchy of visual art.

Annu Vertanen originally studied painting, but graphic art increasingly began to interest her after graduation. She began to produce woodcuts alongside her expressionist paintings. In 1986 she attended a woodcut course given by the American graphic artist Karen Kunc at the Jyväskylä graphic workshop. For her, the course meant an entirely new beginning as an artist. She found the means by which it was possible to place a painter's personality into a woodcut so perfectly that brushes and canvases could be abandoned completely. An artist's background was certainly also of assistance in the woodcut renewal phase, because Vertanen could embark without preconceived attitudes on an experimentation of how a painter finds her creative identity in wood engraving, which is both respected and yet held to be so very archaic.

In her course, Karen Kunc taught a woodcut technique in which all the colours are printed with one plate. The technique radically rationalised the work stages of the woodcut method and gave to artists such as Vertanen the opportunity to focus both on polychromaticism and their own subjective expression. Vertanen also found in wood engraving something which ought not in fact to have been there. She found an almost direct yet undetected ancestral link between the woodcut and the mezzotint. In the proofing order of colours, Vertanen learned from the old lazure painters and created a spiritual impression with her finely tuned layering of colours.

Vertanen rejected the sharpness of the engraving trace and advanced to the other extreme. Her proofs emphasise lineless chiaroscuro, seeking the spatial dimension. The woodcut's naturally living, even capricious, surface and the absorbent paper heighten the intensity of colour, light and space. Vertanen's major theme for years now has been the confusion of the individual on the edge of the unresolved mystery of the world. She tunes thought into the emotion of universal silence and the space of meditation, which could be called the ambience created by wood engraving. A technique considered to be grave and worldly reveals its immaterial dimension in the artist's hands.

Well-versed in oriental philosophy, Vertanen does not reject the individual and his or her relationship with the image. As a counterforce to the vanishing point that stretches into the innermost depths, she sets visual elements that obviously belong to the viewer's own space. In appearance they are like hobby-craft structures, crocheted braids or even a bit like humorous decorations. Alongside the background that dominates the scale of the picture and its supernatural character, one recognises in them hand-crafted human sensitivity. Infinity and silence require the gravity of the earth and the bustle of everyday life in order to make themselves felt.

In her latest series My house: kitchen decoration Vertanen links a person's physical and metaphysical states to each another, but she now emphasises the former more than before, or at least more concretely. From basic household textiles she refines the design of meditation, which could be considered as the synthesis and one culmination of the spiritual content of her art.

Vertanen produces woodcuts with both oils and watercolours according to the Japanese woodcut tradition. She may incorporate into her proofs materials such as reflecting paper and pearls. She has used silicone in her miniature sculptures and she has made several videos. New forms of expression do not, however, call into question her woodcuts, rather they are presented in connection with them.

For the very beginning Vertanen has sought to dismiss from her thinking that parasite of graphic art, which self-ironically stresses the importance of method for its own sake. For Vertanen, high technical accomplishment is nothing if the artist has nothing to say. Satisfaction with mere technical niceties thus means for a graphic artist the same as a tabula rasa does for a painter. The relationship of the self and the world is the theme of Annu Vertanen's art, and the versatile communicator of this theme has found the woodcut and its expressive possibilities, which have slept unused for centuries.

INDEX PAGE