Opening hours:
Tue. – Sat. 10 a.m.–4 p.m., Sun. 10 a.m. – 5 p.m.
Tickets:
Adults €8 / Pensioners, holders of S-etu benefit cards /Students € 4 / free entrance for children and persons under 18.
”And Kivi then?– I didn’t find out about him until I was 26. He appeared to me as a figure of divine grandeur. My own world rushed forth towards me from his works. I had spent my life until then in his spirit, seeking in nature and the common people the same things that he had, and now he gave it all to me again in the powerful clarity of his poetry, deepening my inner world and opening new paths for my quest.”
(Akseli Gallen-Kallela: Kallela-kirja, 1924.)
The autumn of 2008 marks the centennial of Akseli Gallen-Kallela’s illustrations to Aleksis Kivi’s novel The Seven Brothers. Originally published in 1870, this work was the first novel in the Finnish language for which illustrations were planned. This took place already in the 1890s in the wake of growing public appreciation of Kivi’s works. The plans, however, foundered. The Seven Brothers appeared in 1908 in an illustrated version published by Yrjö Weilin. This work was Gallen-Kallela's first illustration project.
The present exhibition takes Gallen-Kallela’s illustrations as its starting point: ornamental sketches for vignettes, pictures commenting on the mishaps of the bull-headed brothers, and the fantastical tales especially told by brother Aapo in Kivi’s novel. The illustrations journey from reality to fable, from realism to fantasy. The story of the brothers is strongly rooted in folk tradition, which is evident in the visual world of the novel through vernacular elements such as sauna-whisks of birch branches and mittens.
The artistic encounter of Aleksis Kivi and Gallen-Kallela is also presented with reference to Gallen-Kallela’s portrayals of the common people and landscape painting. The author and the visual artist shared a connection with the people dating back to their childhood. The unembellished interpretation of the Finnish people offered by Kivi and Gallen-Kallela shocked contemporaries. Kivi’s brothers and their profane language were in contradiction with the period’s idealized conception of the people as expressed in the poems of J. L. Runeberg. Gallen-Kallela’s works of the 1880s encountered similar reactions. For Kivi and Gallen-Kallela, nature, and the forest in particular, was both a place of refuge and a source of inspiration, in Kivi’s words the longing for “the fresh womb of nature”.
The distinctive exhibition design is by Alisha Davidow, Laura Poranen ja Jenni Viitanen, students of stage design at the University of Art and Design Helsinki, and Vespa Laine of the Department of Light and Audio Design of the Theatre Academy.