CentrePasquArt Biel presents the first institutional one-person exhibition of the Finish artist, Kirsi Mikkola (b. 1959), who lives in Berlin. On view through 26 August 2012.
In the last few years Mikkola has been concentrating on a very distinct form of abstract painting. In the place of brushstrokes she combines countless strips and fields of coloured paper, laying them next to each other or overlapping them. In both the large and small format works Mikkola continually surpasses her own limits with complex filigree structures and often dissonant colours. She herself describes her paintings less as a process concerning the production and refinement of a harmonious whole but rather as an act of concentrated eruption.
The complex structures created by the Finish artist come close to the ideal of abstraction as the result of eliminating all referential elements. Her paintings refer to nothing but themselves and do not even trigger associations, mental images or memories. At most, it is possible to talk of the visual representation of forces in Mikkola’s work—gravity, suspension, weight, movement—abstract notions that have a parallel in the forms and colour relationships of paint. Through the latter, the standard formal characteristics of abstract painting—light and heavy, mark and void, straight and curved, fast and slow—are at least hinted at.
CentrePasquArt Biel
Kunsthaus, Seevorstadt 71-73
CH-2502 Biel, Switzerland
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