Ivana Blanco Gross, The Landscape Celebration, 2022

Exchibition at Seppä House, Alfredinkatu 3, Rauma, 7.-18.6.2022. Open Mon–Thu 12–18, Fri–Sun 12–16.
Workshops at Sillanpieli center 29.4.-3.6.2022.

Residency April–June.
Ivana Blanco Gross (AR/US)

Sitting at the intersection that connects conceptual, pop and neo-minimalism art, the show is a celebration of joy and color. It invites you to play with wooden blocks and build your own personal landscape leaving behind the ‘do not touch’ taboo and veneration of the art piece/art museum. The art now in Seppä's House is meant to be inhabited, manipulated, walked through and experienced with a smile. It is casual, tactile and kinesthetic, it is asking you not to just be an observer but a willing participant in the aesthetic experience. In a way, the artist is asking you to be present in her own landscape and interact with it as if you were on a hike.

Blanco Gross's work uses silk screen printing in a non sequential, non repetitive way. The horizontal, an ever present theme in her work, recalls not only the theoretical feminine but the land and our interactions with the territory. In these works the horizontal takes the from of non sequential silk screen prints and the line is treated in a non repetitive way at odds with the natural use of the printing technique.

Her work is assembled together from individual sheets, amalgamated into abstracted scenes that recall laundry hung to dry and at the same time evoke joyous land masses shifting in the horizon of our memories. The abstracted lines and the bright colors express the joy of discovery and the longing for a memory of a happy event.

During the RaumArs residency, Blanco Gross has held art workshops for an adult group at the Sillanpieli Activity Center, where the aim was to present elements of color, line and texture. During the guided exercises, the group discussed about painters such as Miro, Kandinsky, Klee, Haring and Basquiat. Music played a central role in workshops. Thanks to Värirauma and Sorcolor for the paints.

The time and place of the residency also enabled Blanco Gross to work on soundscapes: in her next project, Rauma, Finnish Lapland, Norway and Greenland will be linked together. Her latest finished work is a multimedia work based on the soundscape of the city of Venice and will be on display at the Colombian Embassy’s Venice Biennale 2022 side exhibition. 

Ivana Blanco Gross is an American post-minimalist conceptual artist who studied at the University of Buenos Aires, Argentina (UBA) and at Royal Academy of Art in the Netherlands (KABK). Her work which been shown across three continents in private and public collections, explores the different perceptions of location across geographical space, translating her own connections to people and place into color works and multi-valent installations. She uses different media to express content, such as paint, text, photography, object development, installations, video, and sound.

UN-SEND is an International Collaboration Project created byIvana Blanco Gross in which artists from different nationalities communicate with one another through the exchange of small works. Each of the works in UN-SEND have been created by two artists who live in different places around the globe. There are at the moment 33 participating countries : Argentina, Australia, Belgium, Bolivia, Brasil, Canada, Chile, Colombia, Cuba, Denmark, Dominican Republic, France, Greenland, Guatemala, Honduras, India, Indonesia, Israel, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Mongolia, The Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Senegal, Spain, St. Croix, Sweden, Ukraine, United Kingdom, United States of America, Uruguay. UN-SEND was created by Ivana Blanco Gross on January 15th 2015. As today, there are 78 artists participating in the project and 5100 works created.