AARNE JÄMSÄ

Aarne Jämsä was born 1956 in Jokioinen, now lives in Orivesi. Aarne Jämsä takes a wild, uninhibited approach to art. He has used stone, wood, plaster, a wide variety of materials, but his attitude to the material is uniquely irreverent. Alongside plastic there is elk fur, alongside traditional beech there is aluminium. He has overturned the ageless axioms of sculpture. He has played fast and loose with colour, embellished, played tricks. He has taken a shoe as the theme for a public sculpture and called the work Granite, this having been cast out of glass fibre and ornamented with shards from a broken mirror.

Jämsä’s fantastic works verge on surrealism and Pop art. He has created his own amazing object world, his own zany logic. The sculptures writhe along the floor in an unbelievably complicated web, they wriggle, they are capricious, they are the rootstock of the unconscious, tracks of thought that meander up and down, strange rides in some funfair of the mind.

There is, nevertheless, also another, different Jämsä, a man who respects the artistic order and symmetry of Egypt. Human figures that spring up out of Egypt look inwards and dream everlasting dreams. These sculptures can be static, they can exude authority, yet despite everything, they embody Jämsä’s incomparably joyous masculinity: his delight.