Finnish artist fashions playful works in metal

Steely: Works by Maritta Nurmi at the exhibition.

HA NOI — A playful exhibition by Finnish artist Maritta Nurmi entitled After the End of Art Anything Goes, has opened at Art Viet Nam Gallery in Ha Noi.

Nurmi, a visual artist born in Finland, has been based in Ha Noi since 1994 and is well-known for her installation art. Nurmi's background both in art and in natural sciences, together with her experience of Asia, lends her work a multilayered and multicultural feel.

The artist is famed for her richly detailed work in silver, aluminium and copper leaf on canvas. In this playful exhibition, that combines art and fashion, she has managed to add text to textile to accentuate her works' effervescent surfaces.

Freed from the constraints of making art as it is currently known, Nurmi explores all sorts of media and objects, elevating the everyday and mundane into what we may call the zone of the sublime.

Large round aluminium trays used for steaming rice are suddenly transformed into whirlpools of flora and line; small wooden stools, playfully patterned, spring from the floor to the wall, while their corresponding tea tables are transformed into colourful, functional artworks.

Stainless steel work tables are essays in structure and line; dragons and Buddhas appear faintly in their mirrored surfaces, transporting the object and the viewer into a fanciful world.

Nurmi uses images of roses and repeats them many times in her artworks. "Rose means everything," she explains. "I love roses and I think people do."

In the midst of all the playfulness, Nurmi takes her ideas into yet another dimension. Inspired by the colourful textiles of the people of Benin, in West Africa, where she was an artist in residence in 2009, she had fabrics of her artworks made in India, which she then transformed into her own eclectic mode of fashion – Couture Adorable de Maritta.

Stripes and circles, angles and lines, colour and pattern all collide into a splendid kaleidoscope of fun and frolic, a true testimony to the function of art as art and art as function wherein "anything goes."

"Nurmi's artworks really surprise and attract me," says Pham Trung, lecturer at the Viet Nam Fine Arts University.

"She is an artist of liberalism. She breaks all old orders to create the art of her own. However, she is influenced by Eastern philosophy and Zen Buddhism. She stands at the border of many cultures."

Nurmi has exhibited her works in many countries including Finland, Germany, the UK, the US, Thailand, and Viet Nam.

The exhibition will run until January 7 at Art Viet Nam Gallery, 7 Nguyen Khac Nhu Street, Ha Noi. — VNS

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‘Visual diary' salutes Ha Noi

Musings: Nguyen Cam's painting Temple of Literature is one of 40 works on display at the exhibition.

HA NOI — As Ha Noi approached its 1,000th anniversary, painter Nguyen Cam travelled from Paris to celebrate this momentous historic celebration of passing time with an exhibition at Art Viet Nam Gallery.

All of the pieces Cam has included in the Traces of Memory exhibition are mixed media on canvas created using dark colours.

Calligraphic musings and bits of jute, votive papers, ginkgo leaves, tea bags, and other distinctly Vietnamese elements are scattered over fractured landscapes to give the impression of a visual diary.

All of the materials he used to create his paintings are symbolic, he says. Ginkgo was the first tree to grow in Hiroshima after the bomb. The plant inspires Cam as a symbol of power, vitality and eternity, while tea bags express the changes of time.

"Everyday I drink tea, in a silent and thoughtful space. I realised that the colours and textures of the tea are never the same. I see it as similar to our daily lives: each day is different," he says.

The artist left the country for France when he was very young and he returns with the solemn, wizened perspective of a man whose life has been pushed and pulled, torn and mended.

"As Cam approaches the autumn of his life, having escaped a near brush with death, a heightened intensity and awareness of the preciousness of each and every moment is ever present," says Suzanne Lecht, director of Art Viet Nam Gallery, the painter's close friend.

Ever mindful of the beauty of movement, the artist methodically pursues his future, honours his past, reveres the present, and exposes injuries accumulated along the way, she says.

"I feel an intensified freedom when I return to Viet Nam, the country of my childhood and birth," Cam says. "Certainly returning home, that physical place which creates the landscape and language of our spiritual home, is life giving. It inspires me to delve into the deep recesses of the mind and heart where a solace that helps to face life's vagaries might be found."

The exhibition will run until November 5 at Art Viet Nam Galley, 7 Nguyen Khac Nhu Street, Ha Noi. — VNS

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