Purdy Hicks Gallery is pleased to present a new exhibition of Landscape photographs by Finnish artist Sandra Kantanen, coinciding with the launch of her new publication More Landscapes (Hatje Cantz 2019)

One senses in her work old values of a slower way of life, her interest in Tibetan Buddhism – yet the hints at chaos with the occasional wash of colour, the blurring, the distortion, the mix of techniques, seem to accept that there are flaws not only in man-made thinking, patterns, but in nature itself, and even in her ‘idealised’ vision of it.

Kantanen speaks of her recent Forest series (on-going since 2016) 'I work with coloured smoke bombs during different seasons. I distort the image surface with long exposures and digital paint. The series is a direct continuation of my earlier work which deals with combining photography and painting. Covering, blurring and streaking the photographs surface questions the idea of the moment in a photograph. When does photography end and become something else? The other issue is of course the landscape. I keep to landscape as a subject ever since studying landscape painting in China. These new works however, are from my backyard, a peninsula in southernmost Finland. Here several wars have been fought and I cannot help to think that also the forest has a memory.’

Sandra Kantanen was born in Helsinki, Finland (1974) and studied at the Central Academy of Fine Art, Beijing, and at the University of Art and Design, Helsinki where she took her MA in photography. She has exhibited internationally, most recently at the Getty Center Los Angeles in the exhibition Convergences; Selected P