PAUL OSIPOWPaintings 24.5.2014 – 19.6.2014

Another Olympia, 2014
oil on canvas
155 x 208 cm

PAUL OSIPOW

This exhibition by Finnish artist Paul Osipow continues his examination in recent years of classic themes depicting ancient architecture. He has explored the temple ruins at Didyma and Hierapolis in Turkey and at Olympia in Greece. Osipow´s photographs of the walls, columns, decorative motifs, passages and courtyards of the temple ruins form the source material from which he outlines motifs and makes sketches. The final artworks more or less resemble their geneses: they are modified and revised, amplified and reduced.

When creating his works, Osipow above all turns to the power of visuality, its language and the impressions it creates. It is as if he replaces direct references from reality with his own indirect quotations, thereby trusting in the images of truth he himself has created rather than in the photographic truth, existing history and stories. The birth of a painting: its forms, colours and brush strokes - thoughts, emotions and deeds - has a history of its own. And it is this history that seems to create the story behind Osipow´s paintings.

Osipow also avoids giving names to his works that would appeal to thoughts and feelings and thus charge them with external influences. His paintings are quite simply Buildings, Passages or Courtyards. It is up to the viewer to fill in the course of events in Osipow´s paintings of sites, stories and history inspired by the ancient world. His paintings are charged also with the balanced co-existence of painstaking, yet at times also undisciplined, shapes and the seamless convergence of vibrant colours originating in the hands of the artist. Viewers can enjoy the sophisticated charm of the whole.

Rauli Heino

 
  • osipow/2014/_MG_1678

    Another Olympia, 2014
    oil on canvas
    155 x 208 cm

  • osipow/2014/_MG_1685

    Olympia IV, 2012-2013
    oil on canvas
    104 x 208 cm

  • osipow/2014/_MG_1683

    Olympia I, 2012-2013
    oil on canvas
    135 x 200 cm

  • osipow/2014/_MG_1690

    Olympia VII, 2012-2013
    oil on canvas
    130 x 208 cm

  • osipow/2014/_MG_1654

    Building, 2014
    oil on canvas
    135 x 190 cm

  • osipow/2014/_MG_1667

    Courtyard, 2013
    oil on canvas
    120 x 160 cm

  • osipow/2014/_MG_1696

    Courtyard II, 2013
    oil on canvas
    120 x 160 cm

  • osipow/2014/_MG_1660

    Didyma II, 2012-2013
    oil on canvas
    160 x 135 cm

  • osipow/2014/_MG_1648

    Passage II, 2014
    oil on canvas
    130 x 208 cm

  • osipow/2014/_MG_1702

    Passage I, 2014
    oil on canvas
    70 x 120 cm

  • osipow/2014/_MG_1671

    Passage III, 2014
    oil on canvas
    120 x 240 cm

 
 
 
 
 
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