PHOTOGRAPHIC GALLERY HIPPOLYTE
Kalevankatu 18 B, 00100 Helsinki, Finland
+358 9 612 33 44, www.hippolyte.fi
Open: Tue-Fri 12:00-17:00, Sat-Sun 12:00-16:00

DANIEL ANDERSSON
Messianic Landscapes
7–30 November 2008

Messianic Landscapes is a work that consists of about 30 collages made using postcards from the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. The postcards mostly depict European landscapes, monuments, churches, castles and other places charged with history or mythology. Using these images I find my way to forgotten times and places, forging a link between the present and the past, or an idea or construction of the past. The pictures are dissected and rearranged according to a various geometrical systems in an almost ritualistic way. These new constellations match structures (organic, architectural as well as geometrical) of human faith, longing and desire, with forms that are reminiscent of the process of crystallisation. These prismatic formations can be seen as representations of the way things attain their physical form, but also as symbols for an inner world.

For me, the work is about something that can best be described as "a nostalgia for something that has never existed in reality". Its closest parallel is perhaps the elusive blue flower of 18th-century Romanticism that symbolised a metaphysical longing for the infinite and the unattainable.

Daniel Andersson

Daniel Andersson was born in 1976 in Helsinki, Finland. After earning a Master's degree from Konstfack University College of Art, Crafts and Design in Stockholm in 2006, he has been working on scholarship in London and New York. Daniel Andersson has exhibited his work in internationally, including Galleri Crystal Palace and Bonniers konsthall in Stockholm, the Hasselblad Center in Gothenburg, and Gallery Schnittraum/Lutz Becker in Cologne, with which he exhibited his work at Art Cologne.

Fundamental questions about the world are a constant thread in Daniel Andersson's work. He attempts to illustrate these complex questions in series of works developed over long periods of time. The metaphorical power of images is a compelling source for Andersson, as is the impact of different mythologies and belief systems of our day. Concepts like pareidolia, eisegesis, backmasking and the Rorschach test are very inspiring to him and fuel much of his work.

For more information and press images, please contact:
Petronella Grönroos, exhibition co-ordinator / Photgraphic Gallery Hippolyte +358 9-612 33 44, firstname.lastname@hippolyte.fi

Daniel Andersson: from series Messianic Landscapes, Untitled, 2008