6 February - 27 April 2003
During the spring of 2003 the Finnish Art Society was arranging an exhibition of works by the artist Antti Tanttu in the Sara Hildén Art Museum 8 February - 27 April, after which the exhibition was first transfered to the Joensuu Art Museum 22 May - 7 September and then to the Turku Art Museum 14 November - 18 January 2004. The exhibition was being mounted by the Sara Hildén Art Museum.
Antti Tanttu was born in Fuengirola, Spain, in 1963. He studied in the Finnish Academy of Fine Arts in Helsinki, in the Department of Printmaking 1984-88 and in the Department of Sculpture 1988-89. Antti Tanttu lives and works in Helsinki.
Antti Tanttu is known above all as a woodcut illustrator. He has an original, time-consuming and laborious technique which combines traditional woodcutting, painting and collage-making. Print numbers are small, and only one print is available for most of his works. Tanttu first draws the full-sized motif in charcoal on sketch paper. Unlike with ordinary woodcut technique, the colours are printed using only one plate, which is engraved between taking prints. This results in the production of one work only. Using gelatine, the print is then glued to canvas, which Tanttu further enlivens by adding gold leaf, silver, copper or powder.
The motifs are connected with stages in the artist’s own life, but they can also be seen more broadly as an image of a person’s subconscious and collective memory. Figurative elements and unrecognizable motifs are combined in the works, the names of which help in interpreting them, even though they never fully explain their contents.
The exhibition took a retrospective look at Tanttu’s oeuvre, and included approximately 60 works from the beginning of the 1990s right up to his most recent works completed for the exhibition. The Finnish Art Society has published an exhibition catalogue which includes articles written by Ms Ilona Reiners (Doctor of Philosophy in aesthetics) and Mr Jyrki Siukonen (Doctor of Philosophy in art). The catalogue is in hardback form and is in both Finnish and English.
The exhibition also included two videos: Antti Tanttu’s video Mortui vivos docent of 2001 and Ville Tanttu’s Deep Surface, a documentary film about Antti Tanttu, made especially for the exhibition.
3 117 visitors attended the exhibition.