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Opening hours:
Tue–Sat 11–16
Sun 11–17.
Tickets:
Adults 8 €
Seniors 6 €
Holders of S-etu
benefit card 7 €
Students 4 €
Free entrance for children and persons under 18.
In association with:
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On Crusted Snow is an exhibition presenting winter landscapes by Akseli Gallen-Kallela. Comments on Gallen-Kallela's interpretations of snow themes are provided by works from photographer Juho Suonpää's (1963) series I Followed in Akseli's Tracks, leading the viewer to the present landscapes of Gallen-Kallela's classic paintings. Suonpää's photographs feature either Akseli cut out from cardboard or the artist himself roaming the parts of Central Finland where Gallen-Kallela painted his winter landscapes. In their plain and direct manner, these photographs reveal the traces of man and changes to the natural environment: a bitumen road skirting a lakeshore, a peasant girl's path to the sauna is now bordered by piled snow soiled and sooted by the exhaust pipes of cars.
"I'm shivering like a dog and the paint stiffens like wax when I sit outdoors and paint." (Akseli Gallen-Kallela)
Akseli Gallen-Kallela already discovered glimmering crusted snow as a subject for his paintings while studying art. With their "nature exoticism" the northern winter themes had aroused fascination at the Paris Salons, while responding to the requirement of national art entailed in naturalism. The young artist took up these challenges while staying at Ekola croft in Keuruu, Central Finland, during the winter of 1886–1887. Along with crusted snow sparkling like a Parisian jewellery store, Gallen-Kallela recorded in his paintings the light of cloudy days and everyday life in a farmyard setting. The years that Gallen-Kallela spent in the late 1890s at Kalela, his wilderness residence, intensified his idea of winter as a mysterious magical world. In his plain studies of winter landscapes, there is, in his words, "rich, vigorous life" under the snowy cover. With their swaying rhythm, the artist's long outings on skis induced almost meditative moods.
On his outings, Gallen-Kallela would take along a camera and an etching board to record "fleeting images". The physical pleasure of skiing can be sensed in the forceful brushstrokes of works that anticipated a new conception of art. The artist also used photography to study the lynx-den themes that became his classic winter landscapes with their play of light and colour. At Suolahti in the winter of 1906, Gallen-Kallela had himself photographed standing on the top of a hill on his skis with his gaze fixed towards the horizon. The same masculine self-confidence is expressed in Akseli Gallen-Kallela on Skis (1906), a sculpted portrait by his friend Emil Wikström based on this well-known photograph.
The exhibition is based on the Gallen-Kallela Museum's own collection together with works of art on loan from other collections.
Gallen-Kallela Museum homepage
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