The most prestigious art award in Finland, Ars Fennica, is awarded to painter Kari Vehosalo (b. 1982). The winner was chosen by Curator Beatrix Ruf.
“While visiting his studio and seeing his installation in the Ars Fennica exhibition at Kiasma, the profound and striking experience was for me the ghostly rendering of things as we know them. Images, the history of thinking, the history of metaphor and symbol and the function of language all merge into a theatricality of disruption; in Vehosalo’s work, human desires in their many forms of cultural expression have become dysfunctional and are reconfigured.”, Ruf writes.
The body, projections on realities, mythologies and meaning all break down, crash together and become questionable.”
The Ars Fennica prize is awarded by the Henna and Pertti Niemistö Foundation in recognition of distinctive artistic output of high merit. The prize sum is 40 000 euro.
A joint exhibition by the candidates of this year’s Ars Fennica prize in on view at Kiasma Museum of Conteporary Art through February 18.
Image: Kari Vehosalo. Photo by Pirje Mykkänen / Finnish National Gallery.