Sigurd Frosterus’s post-impressionist art collection has been on deposit at the Amos Anderson Art Museum for nearly 25 years. The collection is owned by the Sigurd Frosterus Foundation, which was established in 1988 by Frosterus’s daughters, Johanna Weckman and Clara Ekholm, to preserve their father’s memory, art collection and intellectual legacy.
The collection gives our visitors insight into a very personal view of early Modernism in 20th-century Finland. The art collector Sigurd Frosterus, who was active in the first half of the 20th century, is primarily known as the architect of the Stockmann department store in the centre of Helsinki.
But he was an extraordinarily multifaceted and gifted cultural personality. Besides an architect, he was an essayist, a critic, an art theoretician and a passionate connoisseur of colour. His broad interest spanned various kinds of art, and extended from the Renaissance to his own era. It is therefore fitting that a room should be dedicated to his collection in the Amos Rex complex where new and old intersect in the architecture and exhibition programme. The Sigurd Frosterus Collection is an important part of the museum’s quest to show the vitality and various guises of art throughout time. It is with great pleasure that Amos Rex, in cooperation with the Sigurd Frosterus Foundation, presents the collection in its brand-new home.