24.2.2024 – 17.3.2024

Visual artist Anne Tompuri (b. 1958) is known for her landscaped black-and-white works painted on canvas with gouache and pigment. The subjects of her paintings have recently become more figurative, and Tompuri has also expanded her work to include free-standing sculptures depicting female figures wrapped in black cloth. She has also created a monumental floor-to-ceiling installation of female figures. 

Anne Tompuri’s paintings have long been views of nature, where bright light, grey shadows and pitch-black darkness have alternated. The motifs in her latest paintings depict melancholy female figures, curled up in the embrace of their long hems or lined in the warmth of fur. Flocks of cranes striding gracefully in the landscape have now also appeared in her paintings. 

Tompuri’s paintings have always been dramatic and evoke powerful emotions in the viewer. In the early days, the paintings depicted saintly female figures dressed in long black dresses, later monumental sublime scenic scenes. The latest heavy-hearted women from the Melancholy and Fur series, as well as the birds from the Cranes series, charged with strong symbolism, evoke strong images of the states of the human mind and layers of the soul in the viewer in the same way as her previous paintings. In her latest works, Tompuri herself says that she has primarily dealt with death and the transience of everything. 

Tompuri’s works have now moved from mental images to images, from images created in memory to representational images, but both image and mental image are always an experiential experience in Tompuri’s paintings – and in art in general – that cannot be fully verbalised. Tompuri seems to literally make art for art’s sake. She has always been uncompromising in her art. The works have been honestly subjective, while touching on the feelings of human life in general. 

Rauli Heino