She changes roles and perspectives, plays with relationships in the creative process and opens ever new doors between photography and other visual arts with palpable delight. The Fotografie Forum Frankfurt (FFF) honours the Finnish artist Elina Brotherus with the comprehensive survey show IN REFERENCE TO A SUNNY PLACE.

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On display are central themes and works from the past 20 years. In various image series and video works, Brotherus repeatedly deals with the diverse connections between model, artist and viewer, between man and woman, figure and place, as well as with the genres of portraiture and the nude. With her typically strange and ironic self-staging, she explores emotions and tensions: being alone and being together, being lost and being safe, love, sadness, yearning, and more often joyfulness.

Often it is her examination of various art movements from Romanticism to Fluxus that inspires her. References to the German painter Caspar David Friedrich, for example, can be found in her group of works The Wanderer, while the video work The Wish Tree refers to the multimedia artist Yoko Ono. Also at the FFF on show is i.a. the series Sebaldiana. Memento Mori, Brotherus’ preoccupation with the German literary figure W.G. Sebald and her mother Ulla Brotherus’ short life as an artist. A book publication by Elina Brotherus on this series will be self-published in summer 2022.

Elina Brotherus, born in Helsinki, Master degrees in photography and chemistry, is an early protagonist of an experimental group of young visual artists i.a. at the University of Art and Design Helsinki (now Aalto University) in the 1990s, later dubbed The Helsinki School. Brotherus, living both in Finland and France, is considered one of the most important contemporary photo artists in Europe. Her work has been exhibited internationally since 1997, is widely published and awarded and can be found in renowned museums and other collections.

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ARTISTS AT WORK (2009)

Having used myself as a model since a long time, I wanted to develop further the notions of the artist’s gaze, the model and the self-portrait of an artist. Last summer I met two young painters, Jan Neva and Teemu Korpela. They have studied at the Academy of Fine Arts of St. Petersburg, where the academic tradition of painting the nude still prevails.

In art history one can find a type of image where the painter presents himself with the model in the studio (and often looks over his shoulder towards the spectator). I wanted a situation where it is the model who presents herself posing as a model. Traditionally the painter watches the model and the model watches nobody. In our “unholy model session” the roles get mixed: the model becomes an image-maker and the painters become models. In principle the situation is similar to that where I’m making a solitary self-portrait, facing the camera on a tripod, and showing with the cable release that I’m at the same time author and subject, artist and model. However, the painters at work concretize the posing as even more real. Furthermore, I was curious to hear how it would affect the painters’ work when the model looks back at them, observes the observers, makes in turn their portrait with her own medium.

I was posing for Jan and Teemu in the Kalervo Kallio Ateljee in Helsinki, November-December 2009. They were painting me and I was filming us at the same time. I realised a series of nine photographs (medium format analog c-prints) and a HD digital video with two cameras.

Elina Brotherus, December 28, 2009

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Fotografie Forum Frankfurt, Braubachstr. 30–32, 60311 Frankfurt

Exhibition period:June 04 – September 18, 2022

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SAT, 10.09., 3 pm GALLERY TALK

»IN REFERENCE TO A SUNNY PLACE« with ELINA BROTHERUS and CELINA LUNSFORD

Fotografie Forum Frankfurt