Toni Elg

Born 1986 | Lives and works in Helsinki

Toni Elg’s oil paintings draw influences from the history of painting, art theory, music, and everyday life. The title of his new exhibition is borrowed from a song by the American country singer Marty Robbins. The song romanticizes the life of a lonely cowboy whose days are filled with the same repetitive routine from morning to night. The title can thus be interpreted as an allegorical invocation of the artist’s lonely routine in his studio. Elg’s formalist paintings take shape through months of patient, layer-by-layer labor. Rather than conveying narrative content or real-world associations, his paintings take their cue from purely visual sources and are best experienced as encounters with color, form, line, and composition.

Toni Elg studied at the Finnish Academy of Fine Arts, Helsinki’s Free Art School, the Viennese Academy of Fine Arts under Daniel Richter, and the architecture faculty at Aalto University. Elg’s work is represented in collections, including the Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma and the State Art Deposit Collection.