CANDIDATE 2005

Mari Sunna

born 1972 in Espoo, lives in London

Mari Sunna occupies a region on the edges of obscurity. Her women do not live their lives in the daylight, but are creatures that emerge from the nebulous stream of people in the metropolises, from memories and states of mind, frequently also from art history. She shows how woman has been a sphinx’s head, a model twisted into various poses, an elegant geisha in a Japanese woodcut, the self-portrait of a woman artist.

In her paintings Sunna makes woman visible and invisible at the same time. She overturns traditions in art by permitting her women some intimacy. They flicker across the surface of the painting, pay it a brief visit and disappear off somewhere into their own stories. They cloak their existence, surrendering only a tiny hint of themselves to art.

Her women are rarely complete, often being only fragments, outlines, a waft of hair in rapid motion. One striking feature is their facelessness. A woman holds a mirror in her hand, but the reflection is empty. A woman stands in a magnificent portrait, her hair decorated by an enormous piece of headgear, but she has no face.

We are bound to compare Sunna to Helene Schjerfbeck. Schjerfbeck, too, painted lots of pictures of women, but they did not portray her models. Her models’ faces became anonymous, and were simplified into strokes of paint, concealed behind layers of white. In one of her self-portraits Schjerfbeck has concentrated on her hair and left the face almost totally blank.

Sunna’s art is not art for the possessing viewer. She does deploy her skills to impose on, flatter, or seduce her audience. The viewer can easily develop a sense of being an outsider here, an intruding stranger, fleetingly privileged to peep inside a world of images.

Pirjo Hämäläinen