Carnegie Art Award 2008

The biggest art award in the Nordic countries to be presented in Kiasma

The Museum of Contemporary Art, Kiasma, is hosting the opening of this year's Carnegie Art Award Exhibition and the presentation of one of the biggest art awards in the world.The award, worth SEK 1,000,000, goes this year to the Swedish artist Torsten Andersson, known for the energetic quality of his paintings. Other recipients are Danish artists Jesper Just and John Kørner and Nathalie Djurberg from Sweden who received the young artist's scholarship.

The jury unanimously awarded the first prize to Torsten Andersson (born 1926) in recognition of his conceptual painting and energetic use of materials. Torsten Andersson's imagery is extremely individualistic and he has developed it throughout his long artistic career.

The second prize, SEK 600,000, goes to Jesper Just (born 1974) from Denmark for his film A Vicious Undertow. In its emphasis on accurate visuals the work includes many references to painting. Just has previously received a great deal of praise for his films, which have dealt with, for example, gender roles and social codes transported from Hollywood cinema.

The Dane John Kørner (born 1967) receives the third prize worth SEK 400,000. In his art, Kørner deals with various historical, social and political issues. The jury particularly appreciated the artist's playful, radiant paintings, in which he reduces the figurative elements of everyday subject matter into abstract forms.

The SEK 100,000 scholarship for a young artist goes to Nathalie Djurberg (born 1978) for her visual narrative in the film New Movements in Fashion. Djurberg's animations have been described as children's films unsuitable for children.

The tour begins in Kiasma
The awards will be presented at an official ceremony in the Museum of Contemporary Art, Kiasma, in Helsinki on 25 October. At the same time, the Carnegie Art Award 2008 touring exhibition will be opened. After Kiasma, the exhibition will go on tour to other Nordic capitals, Gothenburg and London. The exhibition comprises works from the 26 Nordic finalists who were chosen from among 143 entrants.

Six Finnish artists
Finnish artists are represented in the exhibition by Pertti Kekarainen, Jukka Korkeila, Jussi Niva, Vesa-Pekka Rannikko, Silja Rantanen and Anna Tuori.

Pertti Kekarainen received his education as a sculptor and painter at the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague. Kekarainen is interested in the relationship between colour and light, space and time, as well as two and three dimensionality and issues pertaining to them. "The content depends on which series of pictures or which combination of pictures we are talking about. Spaces, movement, expressions, atmospheres, memories ... things that are like the tip of the iceberg, you can find a lot of surprising things underneath them. What you see gives rise to stories later on," says Kekarainen in the exhibition catalogue Site 1.

Internationalism and knowledge of different cultures can be perceived as being realised on a different level in the case of Jukka Korkeila. The artist, who was born in Hämeenlinna, has lived and studied in, for example, Berlin. His paintings have been exhibited in Sweden, Spain, Belgium and the United States, just to give a few examples. Experience and interest in different countries and cultures is made concrete in Korkeila's art: in his paintings he combines various visual cultures of globalised popular culture.

In his works, Jussi Niva has studied and questioned the conventions of painting, in addition to which his output also includes photographs as independent works of art or as parts of paintings. Moreover, the colour scale of photography has affected his paintings. In his works, Niva has studied the absolute, context-independent characteristics of colour and space.

Vesa-Pekka Rannikko has worked with video, sculpture and painting as well as performance art. He has worked on sculptures made from tinted plaster to make the feeling of light present in the sculpture itself. "These works create a paradox, where the sculpture as a three-dimensional object is present in a given space and light while at the same time representing another situation, marked by the light and shadow it carries. Thus, the sculpture is simultaneously present in the past and in the present," says the artist on his website.

Anna Tuori's paintings are expressionism-flavoured works in which discordant elements appear behind the veneer of apparent idyll. Moods and memories of what she has read, seen and experienced serve as points of departure of Tuori's works. "In my work, experience is a prerequisite of expression. I'm not attempting to repeat an experience in my works in a straightforward manner, or relate what has happened to me, but to share and bring out, for example, issues that have arisen in my mind."

The subject matter of Silja Rantanen's paintings are closely associated with the meaning of space and experience as well as the various ways of expressing those concepts in painting. Both the worlds of art and everyday reality are powerfully present in the Helsinki-based artist's paintings. According to Rantanen, art is always based on the personal experience of the artist, which, however, can be focused on general or conceptual issues. "This is something that audiences nowadays have a hard time dealing with in contemporary art: that someone with all her might would want to build a model of, say, the greenhouse effect."