Helsinki-based artist Anna Tuori (born 1976) explores the tension between the visible and the hidden in her paintings.
Image gallery
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Her works reflect how reality is experienced—often through the imaginary, through fictions and illusions. Reality appears to her not as stable, but as fragile, contradictory, and ambivalent, which is expressed in paintings without clear boundaries between inside and outside.
In works such as "Getting the Wind Back," foreground and background blur, surface and depth merge. Transparent acrylic layers meet dense oil paints, and formal, emotional, and expressive levels overlap. Tuori often develops her paintings from abstraction, as compositions of color, rhythm, light, and brushstrokes that express both hesitancy and determination. Thematically, her works are in loose dialogue with still lifes and memento mori.
In "Smell of Green," the ephemeral—an exhausted skeleton—encounters the imperishable, symbolized by ivy.
The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore focuses on the morbid and explores vulnerability, mortality, and the tension between life and death.
In her series Mental Hospitals, Tuori juxtaposes the seemingly familiar with the uncanny. Here, security and fear, closeness and alienation coexist, reflecting fragmented, situationally shaped perception and existential unease. Her works open spaces for irritation, reflection, and an awareness of the ambiguity of what is seen.
