Recently renovated and reopened, Oulun Taidemuseo offers 10 to 12 temporary exhibitions per year and tour guides for the price of entrance. Jasmina Shreck checks out current exhibitions ‘Absolut Stenman’ and ‘Human Traces.’
It’s Sunday, early afternoon, a time when some people are recovering from the weekend and others are visiting the art museum.
A bit too early for the guided tour, I browse through the first exhibition ahead of time. Most of the works are oils, many of landscapes or people. The premises are fairly empty to begin with, but shortly before 2 pm some fifteen exchange students and two elderly women appear and a guide beckons us to the first floor.
“We usually have newer works from the 1950s and after in our exhibitions, which is why we’re pretty happy about ‘Absolut Stenman,’ the guide remarks. ‘This features older paintings and drawings from the first few decades of the 19th century through to 1930.’
According to the guide, Stenman was a pioneer art dealer from Oulu. With problems in school and at home, he found a new world in art books and black-and-white art prints – then went on to ‘discover’ local talents Tyko Sallinen, Juho Mäkelä, and Jalmari Ruokokoski.
He also opened several art salons in Helsinki and Stockholm.
Stenman’s own artistic career remained a ‘short tryout only.’‘If you can’t play an instrument, you can have a drink with the leader of an orchestra,’ the man is reported to have said.
The guide shows a painting called ‘Water Buttercup’ by Eero Järnefelt, depicting an aquatic plant on a dark background. I’m not blessed with a big comprehension of traditional arts and usually fail to see hidden messages in paintings, so I’m surprised to hear the water buttercup represents Järnefelt himself in the form of a filigree plant.
Many of the paintings in the exhibitions are landscapes, several of them painted by a woman called Fanny Churberg.
Churberg, one of the few female 19th Century Finnish artists, concentrated mostly on still life and landscapes. Starting in Helsinki, she planned to study in Düsseldorf, but the academy there rejected her because ‘women were not allowed to study.’
Determined to go to Germany, she left anyway and spent several years of her life there painting under the guidance of Carl Ludwig, a known landscape artist.
Another ‘Stenman’ artist, Hugo Simberg, was a student of Akseli Gallen-Kallella (famous especially for his illustrations of the Finnish national epic Kalevala).
Simberg painted realistic portraits but also focussed a lot on death and devil-related topics. Many of his works are macabre but, though they clearly illustrate death as impersonated by a ‘grim reaper,’ none of them are actually scary – quite the opposite, they include black humour.
What can turn out of relationship problems becomes clear in the case of Tyko Sallinen. One of his paintings, “Mother and Child”, had to be reassembled after the painter had cut it into pieces after his divorce. You can see where the cuts were and where it was glued together again.
The ‘Human Traces’ exhibition, on the ground floor, focuses on relatively recent art.
One memorable work by Outi Sunila entitled ‘Pretty face but rather quiet’ is a black and white photograph of a woman in a flat with her mouth sewn up.
Already a bit disturbed, I get to the other side of the room where there are more photographs, four in all of a woman in a white dress against a black background. While the first three are fairly inconspicuous, the fourth, called ‘Stitches’ (Johanna Lecklin, 2009) again shows a woman with her mouth sewn up.
What exactly the story is behind the women with sewn-up mouths, the guide doesn’t know.
As it’s International Women’s Day I don’t ask whether they’re supposed to express the sentiment ‘women talk too much.’
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