Santeri Tuori

SKY series

Santeri Tuori has been creating his sky series now for nearly 15 years. Drawing from the rich tradition of landscape in the arts, Tuori wanted to give the sky a value on its own – as a pure cloudscape without the grounding weight of the land.

The sky above us is in perpetual motion, and the works echo the constant changes by combinig images from different places and times into one. Drawing from his vast archive of photographs the artist has collected through the years, he builds the images by layering separate images as well as black-and-white layers or negative inversions to create these uncanny works.

The exhibition Immediate Nature in Galerie Anhava shows the most recent works of the Sky series, but also the very first one from 2011–12.

Immediate Nature

The series Immediate Nature is deeply rooted in the tradition of portraiture, something that has interested the artist from the early days of his career, and still remains a constant theme running through all of his works.

In this series, features of close-up portraits emerge from the midst of dense, snow-covered branches, blurring the lines between nature and the characters. There is a close connection between the photographer and his subject, but also between the people and their setting: the photos of trees were taken in a nearby forest – in their immediate, surrounding nature.

SANTERI TUORI

Santeri Tuori (b. 1970) moves easily between the media of photography, moving image and installation, often combining them in one. Over the years, Tuori has persistently examined the traditions of portraiture and landscape in his practice. In his photographic work, Tuori deftly moulds the inherent qualities of photographic material. His richly layered images are built from numerous exposures – positive and negative, black-and-white and colour, transparent and opaque – all of which serve as cornerstones of Tuori's expression, enabling him to construct the dense visual mass that characterises his images.

In his recent works, layered depictions of forests and cloud formations are accompanied by individual cloud studies, and silhouetted bare tree trunks. The artist has been intrigued by how our understanding of time has changed in relation to nature. The idea of permanence and slow transformation is in the new works joined by a more urgent rhythm and sense of immediacy. At times, the landscape appears to surge towards the viewer, while elsewhere the eye is drawn to a dense tangle of branches or a constellation of round images of clouds in varying sizes.

Tuori lives and works in Helsinki. His work has been featured in numerous solo and group exhibitions worldwide, including at Fotografiska in New York, Stockholm and Tallinn; Serlachius Museum Gösta, Mänttä; Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hamburg; Schlassgaart, Luxembourg; Kunsthalle, Helsinki; Purdy Hicks Gallery, London; Mori Art Museum, Tokyo; and Beraro Museum, Lisbon. Tuori's works have been acquired by several major collections, such as EMMA – Espoo Museum of Modern Art, the Serlachius Museum, the Finnish Museum of Photography, FRAC Haute-Normandie, Malmö Art Museum, and the Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma, as well as numerous private collections. Tuori has also realised several public artworks in Finland.

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Santeri Tuori : Immediate Nature

SKY series

Immediate Nature

Cloud series

SANTERI TUORI