Gallery Taik Persons is delighted to announce the first solo exhibition in Berlin by Finnish artist Pertti Kekarainen.
Pertti Kekarainen’s series TILA has been evolving over the course of the past ten years and consists of some 130 works in total. The extensive scope conveys the inexhaustibility of meanings that adheres to the Finnish word tila after which the series is named. In its primary sense, it describes an architectural space, a room, or an interior space inside of an object; moreover a space or distance between different objects. At the same time, tila refers to a conditional state of a phenomenon as well as certain state of mind. Its connotations reach into various life spheres of social, cultural, and political significance.
Testifying to his initial training as a sculptor, earlier works of this series like the TILA Passages (2006–2008) or TILA 1-4 (2012) illustrate Kekarainen’s objective to carve out spatial depth by means of overlapping semi-transparent surfaces, and incorporating graphic elements such as lines, blurred dots, and circular or rectangular ‘holes’ (in the sense of looking holes or points through which to enter the space which reveals itself behind), as well as effects of color, reflection, and shadow. As he explores the maze-like arrangements of layered planes and spatial compartments, the recipient’s fragmented perspective is continuously shifting. At times distorting and disorienting, his eye moves in and out of focus, and a multitude of “pictures in the picture” is created. While older compositions center on architectural interiors and especially images of doors and windows, in the newest works (2014), which are the focus of the exhibition Spatial Changes, human presence features as a prominent visual component. In defining relations of space, distance, and scale within a larger whole, here, human figures or individual body parts fulfill a similarly constitutive structural function. Rather than communicating a fixed, portrait-like representation of a person or personality, Kekarainen’s interest lies in the mutable qualities of human action, gesture, posture, and movement, and how they become perceivable in space as rooms, or areas, or states of the mind.
The perceiver’s experience embraces more than merely a visual dimension of the works. It is informed by haptic and sensory aspects evoked through associations of touch, smell, motion, scale, and light. Crucial to this experience are the physical surroundings of the exhibition space as well as the materiality of the photograph as an object. They ambivalently provide a face-to-face encounter not only between the viewing person and the photographed person, but also between the viewing person and his own, transitional reflection seen ‘in’ the picture. The formation of the assembled exhibits further sets up a dialogical connection among the photographed figures. Whereas the new works of the TILA series are of relatively small format, their large-size versions of a near-to 1:1 scale measure up to two meters in height, bringing about the life-like quality that is a signature trait of Kekarainen’s works.
Pertti Kekarainen, born in 1965 in Oulu, Finland, lives and works in Helsinki, Finland. He is a long-time influential exponent of The Helsinki School as well as member of the Association of Finnish Sculptors and the Union of Artist Photographers. Kekarainen was educated at the University of Art and Design Helsinki (now Aalto University – School of Arts, Design and Architecture) (1984–85), the Academy of Fine Arts, Helsinki (1985–89), and the Vrije Academie van Beeldenden Kunsten, Den Haag, Netherlands (1989). Since the 1990s, he has been continuously exhibiting his works, which are held in numerous international collections, in both solo and group exhibitions worldwide.
