Stella Laura Andersson: The Missing Matriarch of Finnish Dada
Part of God Out of a Washing Machine Ilya Orlov's solo show. Forum Box, Helsinki, Finland
2023
Exhibition view
Playing on the museum format of an ‘unjustly forgotten artist’, the exhibition presented the oeuvre of a fictional artist of the 1950s-1980s, a friend of Douglas Hubler and Robert Rauschenberg, and a forerunner of Finnish conceptualism.
The show introduced Ms. Andersson’s ‘assisted paintings,’ including Landscape with Thermometer; Spinscape, a mechanical mannequin spinning an oval landscape painting; The Left Wing, a right-to-left-inverted copy of Albrecht Dürer’s watercolor; and View of Rome with Inclined Horizon, an inclined vintage print equipped with bubble levels. Other works by Ms. Andersson on display included text-based pieces such as Item Under Restoration (wooden frame, paper, foamcore, wire) and Please Do Not Cross (tempera on the gallery floor).
The story Stella Laura Andersson: The Missing Matriarch of Finnish Dada was written in collaboration with Eero Karjalainen and Mark Maher.
Stormface. 2023. Oil on canvas, plastic frame, suit jacket, shirt
Click the image to see the wallboard content. Text is co-written by Ilya Orlov, Eero Karjalainen, Anna Rawlings, and Mark Maher. Idea: Ilya Orlov.
Stella Laura Andersson: The Missing Matriarch of Finnish Dada was part of Ilya Orlov’s solo show God Out of a Washing Machine at Forum Box gallery in January 2023, along with two other installations (Squares and Freaks of Nature in Time of Evil and Metaphysical Washing Machine) and a conceptual sculptural assemblage Overthrone.
From God Out of a Washing Machine exhibition press release:
"In Orlov’s new show, his trademark strategy of hacking traditional exhibition formats, toying with contemporary art clichés, and poeticising art administration jargon is pushed a little further. A solo exhibition looks like a group show of mutually incompatible artists; wall texts that normally explain the exhibits become exhibits themselves, to be explained by the works. Finally, the exhibition statement, instead of telling explicitly what it is all about, offers a piece of ‘international art English’ so convoluted that it makes one nostalgic about the clarity of e-flux announcements:
“Marrying Duchamp’s eroticist mechanics with forgotten baroque landscape painting; scrupulously recreating Malevich’s craquelures (only for the sake of switching on gravity in his weightless utopia); putting the artist’s own witticisms into the mouths of contemporary philosophers like Timothy Morton and Donna Haraway; planting inverted perspective of Byzantine icons into constructivist axonometry; and finally, turning Sol Lewitt’s cube into a ‘metaphysical washing machine’, the exhibition invites the viewer to look at culture and art itself through a psychedelic conceptualist kaleidoscope of sorts.”
Taide-lehti journal critical review (in Finnish) can be accessed here
Guided tour to the exhibition (Anna Rawlings)
God Out of a Washing Machine exhibition was made with the participation of Eero Karjalainen, Mark Maher, and Anna Rawlings.
Consultants: Juha-Heikki Tihinen, Leonor Ruiz Dubrovin, Matthew Cowan, Andrey Ustinov, Semyon Motolyanets, Sezgin Boynik, and Jyrki Siukonen.
Acknowledgements: Irina Ptakhova, Jan Kaila, Mika Elo, Kaisu Koivisto, Pasha and Sasha Rotts, Frank Brümmel, Elisa Vuori, Lars Federley, Seppo Sinkkonen, Anna Akins, Kamilla Billiers, Avreno Heikka, Jana Siren, Katharina (Ina) George, Martin Ormin.
Special thanks: Riikka Anttonen.
Photographs: Anna Autio, Mark Maher, Anna Rawlings.
The exhibition was supported by Taike, The Alfred Kordelin Foundation, and The Finnish Cultural Foundation.
