ANNE-KARIN FURUNES: Reassembling Reality

As the name of the exhibition, Reassembling reality implies, our reality is not stable, but we have the capacity to evaluate and reassemble it every time we receive new information. The paintings of Anne-Karin Furunes too have a certain instability – a fluid form, where the motif appears and disappears depending on the movements of the viewer and through the interplay or light and shadow.

What we see in the paintings depends on our physical distance from them: only by taking a step back do we notice how the small holes and dots materialize into forms and lines, into glaciers and landscapes – from a distance we can see the pattern they form. For Anne-Karin Furunes, the paintings resemble the impossible logic of memories: something that can magically appear, but when trying to grasp it, can just as suddenly dissolve into fragments. There is more than one way how the concept of distance manifests in the works of Anne-Karin Furunes. Apart from the distance between the viewer and the painting in the gallery space, there is a distance marked by time: Furunes often finds her subjects from historical archives.

The delicate flowers in paintings Nature /detail are based on photographs by the Norwegian botanist, arctic explorer, and nature conservationist Hanna Resvoll-Holmsen (1873–1943). The paintings layer up meanings from the past and present on both the fragile nature of our environment as well as on the importance of the act of documentation, of being vocal. Calving Glaciers (VI–VIII) are on the other hand based on more contemporary photographs by scientist Geir Wing Gabrielsen from the Norwegian Polar Institute. They represent another kind of distances. Apart from the physical distance we as viewers have from the glaciers in Kronebreen, Svalbard, there is the mental distance we uphold in our daily life from the reality of rapidly disappearing glaciers and the impending natural disaster that follows climate change. The monumental paintings capture the glaciers at the brief moment they disappear, right before they dissolve into the ocean and cease to exist. By bringing the glaciers, landscapes and plants from the archival photos onto her paintings and into our time and space, Anne-Karin Furunes in many ways manages to close the distance that separates us.

ANNE-KARIN FURUNES (b. 1961) is known for portraits and paintings based on archival photographs that take a stand for the marginalized, silenced and forgotten individuals, expanding also to include landscapes and elements from nature. She perforates painted canvases with thousands of holes, letting through varying degrees of light. This changing nature of the works in space links them to the problematics of depicting the past, and with the new body of works, to our relationship with nature and environment. 

Anne-Karin Furunes lives and works in Trondheim, Norway. She has had solo exhibitions in recent years at Galleri K in Oslo (2022), Stiftsgården at Nordenfjedske Kunstindustrimuseum in Trondheim (2021), Ryan Lee Gallery in New York (2019), Tornabuoni Arte in Florence (2018) and Palazzo Fortuny in Venice (2014). She has work in numerous public and private collections, including the Museum of Arts and Design, New York; Museo Palazzo Fortuny, Venice; Nasjonaalmuseet, Oslo; Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma; Saastamoinen Foundation; and Statens konstråd, Sweden. Anne-Karin Furunes was nominated for the 2021 Ars Fennica award. 

Anne-Karin Furunes has made several public artworks, and her new commission for the University of Helsinki, featuring the earliest women academics was published on 28 March 2022. The subjects of her three artworks for the foyer of the university's main building are Tekla Hultin, Emma Irene Åström and Karolina Eskelin.

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