Nina Roos: Lucid

Roos is an internationally renowned painter and one of the leading Nordic artists of her generation. She represented Finland at the Venice Biennale in 1995, had large retrospective exhibitions at Kiasma in Helsinki in 2001 and at Malmö Konsthall in 2003 and was Professor of Painting at Uniarts Helsinki’s Academy of Fine Arts in 2001–2004. She also had solo exhibitions at Moderna Museet in Stockholm in 2009 and at Lunds konsthall in 2019.
Celebrated for her uncompromising commitment to her fluid but demanding medium, Roos has long insisted that painting be seen as a system of thought, in particular spatial thought, and as a vehicle for new ideas. She is known – not least by her students at the Malmö Art Academy in Sweden – as a dedicated experimentalist, fully invested in articulating the particular values of painting and, if necessary, explaining how they help us understand the agonised age of the mediatised image:

‘When painting is read as if it were the same as mediatised images, it really becomes impossible to relate to painting.’
For almost twenty years Roos painted on acrylic glass, but in recent years, after exhibiting the series Shades at Galerie Anhava in Helsinki in 2010, she returned to painting on canvas (which she did at the very beginning of her career). The reasons for this are many, specific to her medium of oil painting and to her sense of the changing times, but the physical reality and presence of the painting have remained core concerns.

During the last decade, she also made more drawings than ever before and began to exhibit them. As a ‘bonus track’ to the exhibition at Kohta, she will show a series of drawings from 2015, titled Falling Chair and offering a figurative complement to what the new paintings are doing with finely nuanced colour and intimation of movement through drawing-like forms that sometimes seem tentatively illustrative, sometimes unguardedly open towards an absence of meaning.

Three new series of paintings will be presented, all from 2019–2020. Lucid, lending its title to the whole exhibition, consists of two large (ca 250 × 400 cm) and three more moderately sized canvases in hues we might truthfully, if somewhat reductively, characterise as greyish-pink. The larger of these paintings feature a motif of thin branches or twigs floating on a carefully crafted chromatic haze or piercing it, weaving in and out of the surface, whereas the others employ thinner but similarly vibrant lines of darker paint to cut through and open up a pictorial space that must have been very condensed before these interventions. The reference to lucidity in the title embodies the ambition to pass through the image and find oneself on the way – to real articulation and understanding.