Ilkka Suppanen: Points of View
Galerie Forsblom September 27–October 20, 2019
Opening with the artist in attendance, September 26, 2019, at 5–7PM.
Ilkka Suppanen (b. 1968) is one of Finland’s most internationally acclaimed contemporary designers. He is also the creator of unique glass sculptures with a distinctive signature feature: there is a reflective surface embedded deep in the glass. The voluptuous forms of the weightless, transparent blown glass provide a protective shell for solid, heavy nuggets of shiny mirrors.
The title of the exhibition refers to how mirrors expand and open up new perspectives on our surrounding reality. The modern understanding of how the human eye perceives the world was born around roughly the same time as the first silver and glass mirrors were made in Italy. Filippo Brunelleschi invented linear perspective in the early 15th century with the aid of a mirror. Suppanen’s glass sculptures were incidentally blown in Murano, which was famous for its masterful mirror-crafting skills already during the Renaissance.
Suppanen is intrigued by the idea of how the image we perceive in the mirror contributes to molding our identity. The mirror metaphor is also relevant to the fragmented discourse and media of the Post-Truth age, which provides an endless array of different perspectives and data on our inchoate reality.
Ilkka Suppanen explores humanist and environmental themes in his art. In addition to being an active practitioner of industrial design, Suppanen produces one-off art that has been exhibited at venues including the Venice Biennale and the New York Museum of Modern art. He is the winner of numerous awards and accolades, including the pan-Nordic Torsten and Wanja Söderberg Prize in 2015.