Thomas Nyqvist: Painovoima

His paintings, usually based on his own photographs of demolition sites or other transitory urban ‘non-sites’, are meditations on external reality as it changes around him – and on painting as an evolving system for understanding and expanding this reality.

Painovoima translates as ‘gravity’ but literally means ‘weight-force’. As the title of Nyqvist’s second solo exhibition at Kohta, the Finnish word proposes that painting continues to ‘carry weight’ as a form of collective consciousness. Painting also wouldn’t function without its constant transformation of earth elements (as pigments) into means of articulation and expression.

The exhibition features Nyqvist’s newest work, in both large and small formats, which departs from photographs of excavations and demolished concrete. In addition, it includes selected examples of his paintings from previous decades, notably non-figurative motifs from the early 1980s and nocturnal seascapes from the early 2000s.In connection with the exhibition Kohta will publish a monograph on Thomas Nyqvist, in collaboration with the Helsinki publishing house Parus Verus. It will contain new essays by Anders Kreuger, Director of Kohta and the curator of the exhibition, and by the prominent American poet, translator and critic Dr. Susan Stewart. She has been Professor of English at Princeton University and has authored books such as On Longing (1993), The Open Studio (2005) and The Ruins Lesson: Meaning and Material in Western Culture (2020).