November 5 – January 14, 2023

In Matti Kujasalo’s second solo exhibition at Galerie Friese the focus is on the paintings he has created in recent years and on his current work, in which color always plays a central role.

Matti Kujasalo created the foundations of his reduced vocabulary as early as the mid-1970s, from which he continues to draw new pictorial inventions to this day: line, dot circle and square.

On exclusively circular or square canvases, he composes area-filling structures on a white or black background, each painting being based on a specially developed mathematical concept. These grid-like structures can initially only be perceived as coherent, oscillating formations that seem to literally float in front of the canvas. At times they stretch lightly, then they are condensed across the canvas, at other times they appear two-dimensional and then again like deep three-dimensional pictorial spaces. On closer inspection, the interwoven constructions dissolve into inconceivably fine structures and details and surprise with their multi-layered painted, tissue-like surface structure.

And there in lies the power of Kujasalo’s paintings: Between strict precision and visual opulence they are excessive and clear at the same time – and always challenging the beholder.

Matti Kujasalo was born in 1946 in Helsinki and is internationally known to be one of the main protagonists of a geometric-constructivist tendency, also known as “Konkrete Kunst” [Concrete Art] since the 1970s.

From 1964-1968 he studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Helsinki, where he himself taught from 1977-1988 and within those years served as a director from 1983 onwards. In 1980, he represented Finland at the Venice Biennale. In 2017, he received an expansive retrospective at the GASK Museum in Kutná Hora by Prague. His solo exhibitions were shown at the Salon Dahlmann in 2015 and at the Gallery Klaus Gerrit Friese in 2018. Kujasalo’s works are represented at international museum collections, i.a. at the Albertina Museum in Vienna, at the Stedelijk Museum Rotterdam, at the Forum Konkrete Kunst in Inglolstadt, at the Joself Albers Museum in Bottrop, at the Forum Konkrete Kunst in Erfurt as well as in numerous private collections in Europe and the US.

Parallel to the ongoing exhibition, we are showing selected works by Friedrich Teepe until December 3, 2022..