Tuukka Tammisaari: Bit of a Pickle
Galerie Forsblom, 24.3.–23.4.2023
Tuukka Tammisaari's (b. 1984) highly recognizable visual idiom has grown even richer in his recent paintings, which exude a sincere spirit of joy and free creativity. His canvases radiate an exuberant energy that penetrates directly into the viewer’s subconscious. His breathtaking expressive vigor explodes on the canvas in a giddying imaginative spectrum of dynamic elements. Their multi-layered anatomy finds a perfect companion in his distinctive palette of inflected hues. His compositions are a riot of orderly anarchy that is always surprising but makes perfect sense precisely by virtue of its non-linearity and absence of logic.
His paintings are simultaneously informed by the intense presence in the contemporary moment and conscious allusions to movements in art history. Their style vacillates between the abstract and the representational, straddling the middle ground between something recognizable and something wholly unfamiliar. Surrealistic and even mystical elements have crept into his recent works, elevating their content to a new meta-level. His paintings seem to convey a collective experience, yet each one writes its own story, both on the abstract and physically experienced level. Tammisaari’s style of expression is purely intuitive. When he picks up the brush, he has no idea what will appear on the canvas. His process is indeed painting at its purest.
Tammisaari studied at Helsinki’s Academy of Fine Arts and at the Lahti Institute of Design and Fine Arts. He has held solo exhibitions in Finland, Denmark, Belgium, and the United States. His work is found in the collections of the Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma, the Nelimarkka Museum, Uppsala County, and the Leiden University Medical Centre in the Netherlands, as well as private collections in Finland, Denmark, the USA, Holland, Belgium, and Sweden. The artist is based in Helsinki.