Nanna Hänninen

Viewing Room

Thursday, 07 March 2024

Nanna Hänninen

In Beaty We Walk #1 (Joshua Tree National Park), 2024

Archival pigment print, acrylic paint

55 x 84 cm

Nanna Hänninen, who has played a pivotal role within the Helsinki School since the late 1990s, was one of the first Finnish female artists to work conceptually, utilizing the photographic process to realize large abstract images. Nanna Hänninen’s works often refer to a wide variety of social phenomena and psychological motives and patterns in human behavior, such as the feeling of power, sense of ownership or the feeling of being an outsider, and how over time our private experiences become part of a universal, collective experience. In each of her series, the artist deploys a mix of sculptural, installation and photographic processes through which she is pushing the possibilities of experimental practice.

In her Painted Desert series, the photographs oscillate between the depiction of reality and illusion. Rather than being straightforward representations of the landscape, they are reflections on pictorial reality. With the opportunity to traverse across the Joshua Tree National Park, Nanna Hänninen documented the surrounding natural spaces, reflecting on our relationship with landscape and nature. Working within a reduced range of color tones and basic geometric forms and lines, Nanna Hänninen alters her initial subjects in order to create a personal response to a common reality.