Thomas Nyqvist: Painovoima
Thomas Nyqvist (born in Porvoo in 1955, lives in Helsinki) has been a distinct voice in Finnish painting since he started exhibiting in the late 1970s. He has consistently made the case for painted images in contemporary visual culture, deliberately focusing on what might be called ‘the inner landscape’.
His paintings, usually based on his own photographs of demolition sites or other transitory urban ‘non-sites’, are meditations on external reality as it changes around him – and on painting as an evolving system for understanding and expanding this reality.
Painovoima translates as ‘gravity’ but literally means ‘weight-force’. As the title of Nyqvist’s second solo exhibition at Kohta, the Finnish word proposes that painting continues to ‘carry weight’ as a form of collective consciousness. Painting also wouldn’t function without its constant transformation of earth elements (as pigments) into means of articulation and expression.
The exhibition features Nyqvist’s newest work, in both large and small formats, which departs from photographs of excavations and demolished concrete. In addition, it includes selected examples of his paintings from previous decades, notably non-figurative motifs from the early 1980s and nocturnal seascapes from the early 2000s.
Työpajankatu 2B, 3. krs. Teurastamon piha 00580 HelsinkiFree entrance