Collection: Jukka Rusanen

Jukka Rusanen was born in 1980 in Jyväskylä and studied Fine Art at the Turku School of Fine Arts and the Finnish Academy of Fine Arts in Helsinki. Today he lives and works in Finland’s seventh largest city, Lahti. The artist’s works are part of all Finland’s principal museum collections including the Finnish State Art Collection, the Helsinki Art Museum and the Contemporary Art Museum KIASMA. Jukka Rusanen has worked closely with Lachenmann Art in Germany and Switzerland since the gallery was opened.

The underlying substrates of his pieces are often art historically important works whose depth and spaciousness Jukka Rusanen deconstructs and genuinely recreates anew. In the work Poetic (Split) the artist starts ab ovo: soft, changeable, cloaking silk meets stable, stiff frame; the flawlessly smooth surface of the canvas is split by a merciless slash – through art Jukka Rusanen combines what is thought to be separated: masculinity and femininity, past and present. Homogenous in complete difference, harmonious in relation of total difference, associated contraries.

In his art – as in almost all stories of creation – differences are created; their reuniting, dancing fight is re-played before our eyes. In his painting Thinker the colour becomes the motive, the gesture, the matter. “A painting is an experience of space and a crystallisation of space at the moment it becomes visible” says the artist and thus conveys between the material colour and its function, the portraiture.