30.3. — 21.4.2024

It has been a long time since it has been possible to see Tarmo Paunu‘s large-scale, multi-meter paintings; last time was at the Artist Of The Year 2013exhibition in Kunsthalle Helsinki. The name of the exhibition, Parsimus Maximus, is a combination of Latin and Finnish (Paunu studied Latin at Tampere’s classical high school “Clasu”), and it refers to to human life as a great parsing, an attempt to put together something that was once broken. The large paintings Infantia, Mirabundus and Mortalis together present the themes that repeat throughout the exhibition: childhood, wonder, and disappearance.

Tarmo Paunu (b. 1971) is a painter from Helsinki who grew up in a family of artists in Suomenlinna. Paunu currently lives and works in Pispala, Tampere. Paunu graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in the department of painting in 2008. He has had solo exhibitions in Finland, Germany and Sweden as well as joint exhibitions in Finland, the Baltic countries, Norway, Cyprus and Bratislava, Slovakia. The most important of those have been e.g. Artist of the Year exhibition titled Rakkaudesta (Taidehalli, Helsinki, 2013), solo exhibition God Is A Woman (Kunstihoone, Tallinn, 2014), solo exhibition in Sweden (Galleri21, Malmö, 2007) and Oh My God! -joint exhibition in Norway (Konstlaboratorium, Vestfossen, 2007). Paunu’s works are in several Finnish public and private collections as well as in public spaces.