Ateneum exhibition to highlight Alvar Aalto’s influence on international modernism

The exhibition will open on 11 May, contrary to the earlier announcement

"Alvar Aalto's work showed a broad understanding of the arts. His circle of acquaintances included a large number of people who were agents of change in their time and who sought new forms of expression. We want to highlight these connections", says the museum director Susanna Pettersson.

Alvar Aalto was one of the most influential figures in international modernism. Aalto was a fully-fledged cosmopolitan with a global network of contacts: he and his wife, the architect Aino Aalto (1894–1949), were internationally active, starting in the 1920s. The idea of Gesamtkunstwerk, a total work of art, was important to Aalto: he worked across multiple disciplines, including architecture, urban planning, design, and art.

Assembled by the Vitra Design Museum curator Jochen Eisenbrand, the retrospective exhibition will present Aalto's life and work from the 1920s to the 1970s. The exhibition will feature a wealth of iconic objects and pieces of furniture, as well as architectural drawings and scale models. Interdisciplinarity in art, and Aalto's multi-disciplinarity, will be highlighted through archive materials, works of art, photographs and short films. The exhibition will also feature new photographs of Aalto's architecture, taken by the German photographic artist Armin Linke.

The Ateneum will bring another perspective to the exhibition with the inclusion of works by Aalto’s closest artist friends, including the German-French Jean Arp (1886–1966), the American Alexander Calder (1898–1976), the Frenchman Fernand Léger (1881–1955) and the Hungarian László Moholy-Nagy (1895–1946). Most of the works to be shown at the exhibition were introduced to Finland through Artek and people in Aalto’s inner circle.

The permanent imprint of Artek's international art exhibitions on the Finnish art world

Alvar and Aino Aalto founded Artek together with Maire Gullichsen and Nils-Gustav Hahl in 1935. The company manifesto stated that its line of business also includes art publicity and education. In the 1930s and the 1940s, Artek hosted art exhibitions at its shop and at the Kunsthalle Helsinki. In the period from 1950 to 1997, Artek's exhibition activities were continued by the Galerie Artek in its own gallery space.

Artek's bold and ambitious exhibitions brought modernist classics and the latest international contemporary art to Helsinki. The exhibitions left a permanent imprint on the Finnish art world and on the Ateneum Art Museum's collection.Indeed, the exhibition to be shown at the Ateneum will feature a wide selection of works that the museum acquired from art exhibitions organised by Artek.

The exhibition will coincide with the release of a publication, produced by the Ateneum, that discusses Artek's exhibition activities, and that also highlights the life's work of Aino Aalto in the arenas of art, design and architecture. The publication will feature articles by Jochen Eisenbrand, Susanna Pettersson, and Renja Suominen-Kokkonen.

Before Helsinki, the exhibition has been shown at the Vitra Design Museum, the show's production partner in Germany; in Madrid and Barcelona in Spain; and in Aalborg in Denmark. International sponsors of the exhibition are Microsoft (Global Sponsor) as well as Artek and Iittala (Sponsors).

Opening hours
Tue, Fri 10am–6pm | Wed, Thu 10am–8pm | Sat, Sun 10am–5pm | Mon closed

Admission
Adults €15 | Concessions €13 | Under 18s free admission | with S-Etukortti card €14

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