4.7. – 26.7.2025.

Artists' meeting on Saturday 26.7. In her exhibition Annika Bergvik-Forsander presents a series of oil paintings from a project that started with the partly ironic working title “Finnish Pottery”. She is a visual artist working in painting, drawing, collage and embroidery. Embodiment, gender issues and psychology are topics she constantly explores in her suggestive visual world. The images are often embedded with both art historical references and subtle black humour.

The works on display are based on ideas about materiality and how we collect objects and give them different values. The images specifically play with fictional ceramic utility and decorative objects, and the painted or drawn visualizations give them the character of portraits. Conceptually, the project relates to both over-consumption and so-called “conspicuous consumption”. By purchasing a certain type of status objects, the owner hopes to increase his or her personal status and perhaps obtain a desirable social affiliation. The images in the series are consistently queer and feminist in nature, flirting with parts of the human body and bodily deviations. The queer is integrated into the depicted objects as unique creations. They are odd and idiosyncratic alternatives to contemporary normative status objects.

Bergvik-Forsander has received support for the exhibition from the Finnish Cultural Foundation, the Swedish Cultural Foundation and the Svensk Österbottniska Samfundet.

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Bergvik-Forsander has held some 40 solo exhibitions around Finland, including Galleria G, Galleri Sinne, Vasa konsthall, Poriginal galleria, Borgå konsthall, galleria Titanik and others. She has participated in many group exhibitions throughout Finland and abroad in Munich, Berlin, Riga, Salzburg, Umeå and Stockholm. In addition to her visual arts degree, she also holds an MA in art history from Uppsala University. In 2021, Bergvik-Forsander was awarded the prize for painting from the Marcus and Eva Collins Memorial Fund. See more info at https://bergvikforsander.com/

Open Mon–Thu 13–18 and Fri–Sat 11–14. The exhibition accompanies an artists' meeting 26.7.