Lachenmann Art Gallery

Jukka Rusanen was born in 1980 in Jyväskylä and studied at the Turku School of Fine Arts and the Finnish Academy of Fine Arts in Helsinki. Today he lives and works in Finland’s seventh largest city, Lahti. The artist's works can be found in all of Finland's most renowned museum collections and are also among a number of private collections in Sweden. The underlying substrates of his creations are often art historically important works, whose depth and spaciousness Jukka Rusanen deconstructs and genuinely recreates anew. The artist is homogenous in absolute difference, harmonious in the relationship of extreme diversity and associating contrasts.  In his art – as in almost all stories of creation – differences originate. “A painting is an experience of space and a crystallization of space at the moment it becomes visible” says the artist and thus conveys between the material colour and its function. The Finnish artist tells of the relationships between things. The starting points are the rhythm, the themes and the materiality of classical painting, which he approaches by using traditional techniques, collages and fabric weaving as he shows, for example, in his hand woven work ›Alku‹. The often large-format canvas works are captivating due to the mostly impasto application of intensive oil paints on a flat background.

Jirka Pfahl was born in 1976 in Wurzen and, after studying with Prof. Helmut Mark and Prof. Dr. Beatrice at the Academy of Visual Arts Leipzig, he graduated with Prof Helmut Mark.

Jirka Pfahl offers us new ways of looking at individual works, which can also turn out to be contradictory. Something that may seem banal and meaningless att first glance might become suprisingly significant on closer inspection or from a new perspective. Among his production, the artist produces tridimensional paper foldings that are imbued by mathematical beauty. In these works the constant use of the line is united with the incidence of lights and shadows. What at first sight appears to be a chaotic arrangement becomes ordered and clearly structured once the relationships between the composing elements of the object are unfolding in front of the viewer. Jirka Pfahl plays with the differences between digital and analogue, between the original and copy plays with words and their meaning.