Tornabuoni Arte hosts an exhibition of Anna-Karin Furunes

Tornabuoni Arte will host the solo exhibition  of the Norwegian artist Anne-Karin Furunes until the 29th September 2018

Anne-Karin Furunes (Trondheim - Norway, 1961), did artistic studies in Oslo and Trondheim and architecture in London and Copenhagen. She has made a series of public works in Norway and has held solo exhibitions in Europe, Canada and the United States. Her works are featured in major collections such as The National Museum of Contemporary Art in Oslo, The National Museum of China in Beijing and The Museum of Art and Design in New York.

In her paintings, Anne-Karin Furunes uses archival photos of anonymous faces to investigate their personality and identity, searching in the faded photographic tracts labile traces of forgotten lives and personalities who have escaped from the history register. The ingredients used wisely by the artist in his paintings are light and memory. Her works refer to the suggestion of the flow of history and of the human being who lives it, only natural elements appear in the last works among the subjects chosen by the artist.

The artist observes and stores the photographs, then reproduces them on painted surfaces thanks to thousands of perforations. A technique that has an artisanal, almost sculptural dimension, made with a punch and a hammer. The holes-incisions have different dimensions to pass the light that defines the traits of the image through the chiaroscuro ratios. The perforation works like a negative, like the plate of an incision. At first glance, what we see in the work is a canvas covered with hundreds of perfect holes of different sizes. Only by distancing ourselves from the surface of the painting emerges a face or a landscape, at the beginning only an allusion to the image portrayed, then, the further one moves away from the work, the representation is defined in a clearer way. If you miss the strategic point, the image fades. Anne-Karin says of her drawings of holes: "The image evaporates as soon as we approach the canvas. Close up, you can see the real walls through the empty holes ". Thanks to the varying light and weather conditions of the day and the space for which they are designed and in which they are set up, these works are always enriched again and are reborn to their own new life.

Nicoletta Curradi