On Wednesday 30March at Officine Saffi, Milan, the first solo show in Italy by Finnish artist Kati Tuominen Niittylä (Helsinki, 1947) will be inaugurated. The show, which received the patronage of the Embassy of Finland in Rome, offers an intimate, profound journey through the work of this eclectic artist, an interwoven tapestry of one-off pieces along with design products for the company Arabia.Officine Saffi continues its exploration of Nordic art, presenting the exhibition titled Kati Tuominen. Kuviaopen to the public from 31 March to 27 May.
It represents a high point in Kati Tuominen’s oeuvre, a voyage starting from her memories of infancy in the Finnish countryside, the source of her creations, as suggested by the titles of some of her works: Winter, Rain (Sade), and frost (Kuura).It is the concept of Image (Kuva) that is pivotal in the new series of works presented at Officine Saffi, Milan.
Instantaneous visions of full, dense presence, depicted with minimalist, simple gestures, that seem to have reached a balance between form, movement and spirit. They represent a spiritual exercise, analogous to the practice of Kyudo, a discipline used by the artist to reach the maximum comprehension of the essence of things.Timeless forms that make reference to an ancestral past, and that nonetheless reveal a modern, metropolitan conscience. "Forms bear a message. We all have our own experiences, ideas and visions of life, through which the message of form is filtered”.And it is our individual filter, referring to Tuominen's works, that leads us towards an object and enables it to trigger something intimately significant for each of us.Kati Tuominen's chosen material is clay, that she uses for its ductility and absence of form, giving it the potential to take on an infinity of shapes. Her process of creation begins from the material. “Creation means attaining freedom through form… but the work involved and the creativity are also connected to the sphere of knowledge. What I mean is that artists have to know the material with which they work." Her choice for ceramics was in part based on her fascination with classical forms.The linear simplicity of her forms contrasts with the intensely complex textures of the surfacesof her avant-garde pieces. They are dense surfaces, rich in motifs, objects on which life has left the signs of its passage. Marks that "can be read by means of emotions and instinct." To create her pieces, Kati Tuominen uses “fragments of material to attain a dimension that gives meaning to everything." She says of her work, "I don't make works, I make moments that have been lived, traces left by life. The shapes and colours reflect a presence, of time, place and man, at this instant, between past and future.”
