Niko Luoma

The Helsinki School Perspective

Opening: Friday, 30 June 2023, 6 – 8 pm

Exhibition: 1 July – 9 September 2023

Venue: Persons Projects, Lindenstr. 34 and 35, 10969 Berlin

Persons Projects warmly welcomes you to our summer exhibition: The Helsinki School Perspective. The show is presented in both gallery spaces Lindenstr. 34 and 35, featuring a selection of artists, all of whom had pivotal roles in the beginning of the Helsinki School. The exhibition is dedicated to the historical aspect, exploring how these artists use the photographic processes as a voice for abstraction and a tool for interpreting their emotional landscapes. The Helsinki School platform was created by Timothy Persons in the 1990s, who became inspired by his experience with the Open Studio Concept that was popular during his graduate studies in the mid-1970s in Southern California. It grew to become the most extended sustainable educational platform of its kind consisting of 6 generations of selected MA students originating from the University of Art and Design, Helsinki, Finland. There are now more than 180 monogram books and 6 volumes of the Helsinki School book that have evolved from this program. This exhibition is curated to reintroduce a new perspective on the conceptual roots that built The Helsinki School.

A Line Has Time in It – Revision

Exhibition: 26 November 2022 – 25 February 2023

Venue: Persons Projects, Lindenstr 35, 10969 Berlin

Virtual Tour

David Hockney, once said, "drawing takes time, a line has time in it.” Inspired by this, Persons Projects is proud to present a group exhibition exploring the various approaches that shift the parameters of understanding what a line can be in the context of a drawing. These selected artists use a multitude of different materials as well as the passage of time to express their conceptual propositions in visualizing these linear representations.

Niko Luoma | For Each Minute, Sixty-Five Seconds

Exhibition: 29 April - 28 August 2021

Venue: Persons Projects | Helsinki School, Lindenstr. 34, 10969 Berlin

We are thrilled to present Niko Luoma’s solo exhibition For Each Minute, Sixty-Five Seconds. This exhibition features a selection of works from his Adaptations series, which focuses on his fascination with reinterpreting artworks from art history that have either influenced him or the way we think as a society about art. It is accompanied by his newest publication with the same title by Hatje Cantz and vitrines including not previously presented drawings and sketches.

Niko Luoma is one of the world’s leading abstract photographers and a key figure in the Helsinki School movement. He diligently works within the analog photographic process while his geometrical compositions are done without any digital manipulation. His method of working is intentional, and the composition of the image is well planned, yet he never really knows the final outcome until it’s printed. Luoma’s photographs find their contextual roots in how he combines cubism with constructivism to form his own style of abstraction. He pushes the parameters of how we perceive and interpret through his use of the photographic process as a means to create his own visual language.

A Kiss Given by Time to Light

Opening: 23 – 24 May, 2020, 12 – 6 pm

Exhibition: 23 May – 25 June, 2020

Participating Artists: Timo Kelaranta, Niko Luoma, Pertti Kekarainen, Niina Vatanen, Kira Leskinen

Venue: Persons Projects | Helsinki School, Lindenstr. 34, 10969 Berlin

Persons Projects welcomes you to join us 23 and 24 May 2020 for the opening of A Kiss Given by Time to Light, a group exhibition featuring Timo Kelaranta, Niko Luoma, Pertti Kekarainen, Niina Vatanen, and Kira Leskinen.

It’s a tribute to Timo Kelaranta’s influence as a mentor, teacher and artist in how his experimentations with abstraction has inspired one generation after another from the Helsinki School. This exhibition reflects upon how all these artists use the photographic process as a means to exercise their own sense for essentiality in defining how they collect time through multiple exposures inspired by sound, space, color and light. Looking back over the past thirty years, Timo Kelaranta must now be considered one of the first photographic pioneers in the Nordic region to explore the numerous possibilities of abstraction as a voice in visual poetry.

Abstractions

Exhibition: 26 October – 16 November 2019

Address: Lindenstraße 34, 10969 Berlin

Participating artists: Timo Kelaranta, Niko Luoma, Teea Saanio, Mikko Sinervo, Ea Vasko

Persons Projects | Helsinki School is thrilled to announce the group show »Abstractions« with Helsinki School artists Timo Kelaranta, Niko Luoma, Teea Saanio, Mikko Sinervo and Ea Vasko. The presented art works are united in the self reflective approach, exposing the nature of light and photography itself, while moving away from the concrete object into fascinating abstraction.

Niko Luoma | Content is a Glimpse of Something

Opening: 27 April 2018, 6 – 9 pm
Exhibition: 28 April – 23 Juni 2018

On the occasion of Gallery Weekend Berlin, Gallery Taik Persons has the privilege and pleasure to introduce Niko Luoma‘s most recent works in the exhibition Content is a Glimpse of Something.

The title of the show stems from an interview between Willem de Kooning and David Sylvester from 1960 unfolding the method by which the painter approached his paintings prior to and during the process of realizing them. Luoma, who uses one of de Kooning’s bronze sculptures Head #4 as a subject piece in the exhibition, was drawn to the title by this discussion because of his own fascination for the process of doing, specifically in how it utilizes the act of trial and error as a way to unleash the unexpected. Luoma‘s uniqueness is based around his system-based experiments where the negative becomes a record for its own realization, for the compositions of overlapping planes of color and dimensionality. In his most recent series Adaptations, he reinterprets masterpieces from art history, spanning his inspirations from Vincent van Gogh’s Sunflower series (1887–89) to the iconic swimming pool paintings by David Hockney from the 1960s.

Niko Luoma | Content is a Glimpse of Something

Helsinki By Night

Exhibition: 5 April, 2008 - 11 May, 2008

Address: Bergstr. 22, 10115 Berlin-Mitte

Gallery TAIK is delighted to present artists from The Helsinki School with the group exhibition Helsinki By Night, presenting their latest works.

Helsinki by Night – Berlin a project by the University of Art and Design Helsinki will open three exhibitions – in collaboration with the Museum for Contemporary Art Kiasma, Helsinki and the Berlin Biennale für zeitgenössische Kunst, which every two years has approximately 50.000 visitors at the opening weekend (held in Berlin-Mitte). The exhibitons will feature Pasi Autio, Hannu Karjalainen, Juha Nenonen, and Santeri Tuori at brandatmosphere, Ola Kolehmainen at Galerie koal and Jyrki Parantainen at KFA Gallery. Along with those coordinated openings Gallery TaiK will open an exhibition featuring Tom Hunter (Helsinki School professional workshop series). Alongside there will be shown four video artists from the Helsinki School and selected videos from the Kiasma collection. Furthermore there will be a private showing of Timo Kelaranta, Ulla Jokisalo and Pentti Sammallahti.