The relationship between the now and what has long passed is the topic of Finnish photographer Anni Leppälä (born 1981 in Helsinki). The representative of the renowned Helsinki School, who works more and more with conceptional photography, shoots landscapes, still lifes, spaces, and people – most often women, with whom she can better relate. She shows them from behind or looking directly at the beholder. Her works often appear as stylized postcards or show snapshot-like transient moments, which give a small impression of a greater story. And somehow these brief moments manage to anchor themselves in our memories. The Gallery Taik Persons presents here on GoSee an little taste of the solo exhibition with new works by the photographer.
Anni Leppälä studied at the University of Art and Design Helsinki and was chosen as the Young Artist of the Year in 2010 in her home country. Her works can be found among others in the art collection of the Deutsche Bank. In an interview with db magazine, she explained that the challenge of photography lie in bringing the visible together with an inner world or experience of the beholder – but in a entirely different way than the actual visual surface of the image would suggest.
Berlin-based art historian Shao-Lan Hertel describes the exhibition as follows: "Leppälä’s works draw landscapes of the interior. With their acute sensibility of color and power of composition, they speak beyond the representational realm of words. Her motifs function as visual signifiers-⎯non-verbal metaphors and symbols⎯that carry concealed, ambiguous meanings. Leppälä aims to reveal the invisible routes that lead us from the tangible to the oblique image, which can be released through the evocation of a certain memory, an emotion, an anxiety.
As settings for her works, Leppälä chooses natural surroundings such as secluded forests, the outside and inside spaces of abandoned countryside dwellings, or the more abstract topographies of material surfaces including wood, plastered walls, and wallpaper. As with her older work series, the solemn and graceful adolescents who figure in many pieces seem to indicate themes of childhood, remembrance, and threshold. (...)
Leppälä‘s works are full of subtle paradoxes. The most enchanting one seems to be their emphasis on a condition inherent to the photographic genre: a concurrent expansion of presence and absence, in that the images capture both something that is, here and now, and something that was, past and gone forever. Characteristic aspects of Leppälä's work that we were already familiar with appear to have now become more intense, more distinct, more uncompromising."
The vernissage will take place on Friday, 15 January, 2016 from 6pm–9pm . The exhibition can then be seen from 16 January – 5 March, 2016. Gallery TaiK Persons, Lindenstraße 34, 10969 Berlin, gallerytaikpersons.com
Gallery Taik Persons was founded in 1995 in Helsinki and is since 2005 located in Berlin. The gallery represents a select group of established and emerging artists. The program is centered around a conceptually rigorous artistic practice with a main focus on the photographic process. It is the prime gallery for those selected artists who now make up what is known as the Helsinki School. Its creator and director Timothy Persons is Adjunct Professor at Aalto University, School of Arts, Design and Architecture.