Icy Prospects #65, 2014
pigment print, diasec, framed
150 x 185 cm
edition of 6
JORMA PURANEN is one on Finland’s most celebrated photographers, known for his Nordic landscapes with a conceptual approach. Considerations of the relationship of past and present are crystallised in Puranen’s work in photography. In his many different yet always equally compelling and precisely executed projects, he has worked in a wide-ranging manner with various historical visual sources since the early 1990s. Puranen’s works highlight the material nature of photography: the grains of the photograph, the relief created by printing ink and light reflected from the surface of a photographic print parallel the original visual motifs and gain a central role. Light reflected from the surface of pictures prevents the viewer from seeing the image as a whole, which in the artist’s thinking is a metaphor of the difficulty of understanding history. The variety of methods offers the viewer a rich visual thicket with a visual idiom that is both challenging and poetic.
Jorma Puranen (b. 1951, Finland) studied photographic art at the University of Art and Design Helsinki from 1973 to 1978, and served as a professor of photography from 1995 to 1998. His works are in numerous museums and collections, including the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, the Maison Européenne de la Photographie collection in Paris, and Moderna Museet in Stockholm. In recent years, he has held solo exhibitions at venues such as Ars Nova, Turku; Luleå Konsthall; Purdy Hicks, London; and Bunka Gallery, Higashikawa, Japan. Puranen has participated in many group exhibitions, including at LACMA Museum, Los Angeles; Kunsthalle Helsinki; Stadtgalerie Kiel; Palais des Beaux-Arts, Brussels; Museum of Photography, Thessaloniki; and National Gallery, London.
They could hear a faraway thunder 2, 2022
archival pigment print, glass, wooden frame
169 x 134 cm
Lost in Stars, 2017
archival pigment print
85 x 120 cm
edition of 6
Seascape after Rain 4, 2021
103 x 84 cm
archival pigment print
Memorandum of Loss
11 Jan – 4 Feb 2018
Goyas Head, 2017
archival pigment print
45 x 36,5 cm
edition of 6
Memorandum of Loss
11 Jan – 4 Feb 2018
Victims of Finnish Forest Murders, 2016
archival pigment print
35 x 25 cm
edition of 6
Forest in Rain, 2016
C-print, Diasec
110 x 160 cm
edition of 6
In Wihuri Foundation Collection
Shadows, reflections and all that sort of thing #37, 2008
C-print, Diasec
71 x 56 cm
