Jenni Rope: Hide-out
September 18–October 18, 2020
Jenni Rope (b.1977) paints by intuition, allowing her paintings to find their final shape through a spontaneous process. She begins by pouring the paint directly onto the canvas. Occasionally she has a color scheme planned in her mind, but it usually evolves in new directions as she adds one layer of paint upon another. In her most recent works, she instinctively drifted toward shades of green.
Rope captures the illusion of vivid motion while retaining a sense of rhythmic balance. Her playful brushwork invokes a sense of liberated movement, with her brush suddenly leaping across the canvas and back again, while at other times it lingers in one spot or holds back, as if hiding. Rope enjoys playing with optical illusions of space and motion, puncturing her two-dimensional surfaces with doors to three-dimensional spaces. The illusion of depth is inherently unstable, permitting viewers to constantly discover new ways of looking at her works.
As of 2015 Rope has been working on mobile sculptures that play with forms and their interrelationships. The individual pieces spin on their respective axes, taking up far more space than their actual physical size might suggest. As they spin, each piece traces outlines of new 3D shapes in the air, while also destabilizing the spaces in-between. Her mobiles thus exist in a state of perpetual flux.
Rope’s public artworks can be viewed at the Helsinki University Library and the Kalasatama Health and Wellbeing Center in Helsinki. She is the 2016 winner of the Finnish Art Society’s William Thuring Prize. Her work is found in many private collections and in the Saastamoinen Foundation Art Collection and the State Art Collection.