Susanna Majuri vertreten von Galerie Adler

Galerie Adler is delighted to announce the first solo exhibition of the successful Finnish artist Susanna Majuri in Germany. With the show “Vom Wasser verweht” we would like to abduct you to the mystic and surreal photographs of the artist, who became known with the renowned Helsinki School.

In her photographs, Susanna Majuri captures short narrative scenes as though they were film stills of a story yet to be told. Her main characters, young women mostly, their faces hidden, give a distinct impression of being lost, seeking for something they would just not find, dissolved in profound loneliness, yet somehow determined or rather resigned to this beautifully sad fate of theirs. The surrounding nature acts as complementary character, working as an emotional conduit both familiar and antagonistic. The ever changing surface of the water, once smooth as a veil of silk, once rippled though by a secret storm raging underneath, provide scenes of oscillating atmosphere ranging from quiet solitude to immediate danger. The vivid coloring of Majuri’s works, the harsh contrast between bright shades of red or blue against the soft earth tones of the background, mirror her innermost feelings.

"I need color to exist. Water is color and it changes the things it touches. I need my inner world to exist. Imagination is willing to be seen and taking a form. I paint it here. I need this person, the place, the water, this touch."

With this intimate confession, Susanna Majuri creates peculiar, bizarre or even surreal atmospheres and situations for her characters. Her images are charged with what might be, ambiguous in that the viewer can only imagine that which remains outside of the frame and gives the impression that we only get parts of what must be a bigger story. Susanna Majuri suggests multiple psychological and symbolically charged scenarios: “I want to show that one can find the fantastic from nearby. Fiction blends into our life. The imaginary is in fact actual.”


Woman with dark hair, 2007, DVD, 10:32 min		Hannu Karjalainen *1978 Haapavesi, Finland

Like the passage of time, also the pull of gravity marks directions in space, which the work's own space then seems to gently dispute. Physical attraction is left unfulfilled, but the image nevertheless becomes pregnant with the sheer density of the undelivered moment opening on itself.
Only the woman's blond hair seems obedient to the force of gravity, the strands of hair hanging down, veiling her face. As if to remark on this, almost to provide a polar opposite of a sort, Woman With Dark Hair (2006) shows a disobedient head of hair, flowing freely in care of an invisible wind. Turbulence and immobility cross. The woman, like Medusa, faces the viewer, both transfixed. The woman's hair acquires an immense weight as an element of her appearance. We may customarily think of a person's hair as a kind of framing for a face, a parergonal element that is kept in check by the face as a whole. Here the supplementary feature assumes control and erodes even the very idea of appearance itself, as well as the certainty of a clearly defined body. The corpus (of the woman and perhaps of the work also) becomes a partly unseen entity, extended in space, with an aura of strands - of hair and of signification.