ANNA TUORI

The paintings of Helsinki-based artist Anna Tuori (*1976) operate within a field of tension between visibility and concealment. Her work is driven by the question of how reality becomes perceptible – and whether it often emerges only indirectly, through imagination, fiction, or illusion. Tuori does not conceive of reality as stable or unambiguous, but as fragile, contradictory, and at times unsettling. Rather than seeking rational explanation, she approaches it through an acceptance of ambivalence and paradox.

This approach translates into a painterly practice in which distinctions between inside and outside dissolve and pictorial layers seem to slip into one another. What is still canvas, and where does the image begin? What constitutes foreground or background? In works such as Getting the Wind Back, this perceptual uncertainty becomes particularly palpable: are we looking out through a window, or into an interior? The curtain – normally meant to shield or conceal – is transparent. Through this subtle displacement, surface and depth begin to tilt.

Tuori’s work brings together divergent painterly strategies: transparent, almost immaterial layers of acrylic paint coexist with dense, corporeal passages of oil paint; fluid, watery moments meet a pronounced material presence. Painting appears – as in Tuori’s perception of reality – as an open field in which formal, emotional, and expressive levels are simultaneously effective. Tuori often develops her paintings from abstraction, composing with color, rhythm, touch, and light, allowing the image to unfold and open itself to the unforeseen over time. Central to this process is the brushstroke, understood as a trace of hesitation and resolve, of truth and deception.

Her works also engage in a loose dialogue with the tradition of the still life and memento mori.In Smell of Green,a skeleton sits in the right corner of the composition, entwined with large ivy leaves, its posture exhausted, and its head lowered toward the ground. The skeleton as a direct reference to transience and lifelessness, while ivy – an evergreen plant – signals endurance and continuity. From this juxtaposition emerges a reconfigured still life, in which the interior – the lifeless – moves outward and becomes entangled with the idea of persistence.

In The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore, the morbid – and here overtly disturbing – comes to the fore. A bleeding cow, hanging upside down, turns the painting into a site where questions of vulnerability, finitude, and exposure are negotiated. In both works, the body becomes a bearer of existential meaning, while clear-cut interpretations are deliberately withheld in favor of an open, unsettling visual language that keeps the tension between life and death, visibility and repression unresolved.

Tuori’s paintings often generate an atmosphere that oscillates between familiarity and estrangement. In her series Mental Hospitals,domestic, seemingly secure settings are infused with something uncanny and indeterminate – resembling images of the unconscious. Feelings of shelter and fear coexist. The works follow neither a logic of either/or nor an impulse toward reconciliation. Instead, they allow contradictory sensations to remain side by side, pointing to an underlying existential unease and to the fragmentary nature of perception itself – always situational, always shaped by sentiment.