Minna Kangasmaa

Carsten Schiefer | Curator, Galerie elm75, Berlin, Germany

Kangasmaa values crude raw materials. She works with wire, fragments of tile and concrete. Yet the Finnish artist transforms her unsophisticated source material into delicate content. In so doing, she keeps a stark contrast between the material and the motivation, which is often close to nature. This is immediately obvious, even before the depths of Kangasmaa's work become apparent.

Mankind has always dreamt of bringing the dead back to life or of creating life itself from art, as in Ovid's Pygmalion. It is no doubt a good thing that mankind has never succeeded in this. But Minna Kangasmaa is well on the way. From dead materials, she forms objects whose shapes are taken from nature. She transforms crude, hard fabrics into oversized flowers, lacy wire trees in full bloom or exquisite concrete mussels. The result is surprisingly graceful, cancelling out the crudeness of her material, without denying its origin. Kangasmaa takes a sober view of her nature resurrected, which she sees as interpretation, not simulation. Kangasmaa has no desire to be Pygmalion. Instead, she focuses on creating artificial life built on its own outlines, instead of trying to create a complete illusion. The fragility of the model is "cured", but its value becomes clear only as a result of this cancelling-out.

Wherever there is symmetry and elegance to captivate, the artist forgoes mystical entanglement and fairytale-like confusion. She distances herself from conventional representations of gardens from art history. Minna Kangasmaa works in the here and now and is as respectful as she is contemporary in her interpretation of nature.