The Kuopio Art Museum
The Kuopio Art Museum is in the centre of Kuopio at the corner of Kauppakatu and Vuorikatu Streets near the Cathedral and Market Square of Kuopio. The main themes of the museum’s collections and exhibitions are the human experience, nature and the environment. Art education is an aspect of all the activities of the art museum. As a regional art museum the museum is responsible for acquiring and storing art-historical material from the Northern Savo region. The museum’s tasks also include displaying, documenting and researching the visual arts of its region.
Opening hours
The museum is open from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday – Sunday, from 10 a.m. to 7 p.m. on Wedneday. Closed on Monday.
Admission fee
€ 8/5, free admission for persons under 18.
Exhibitions
The Artist’s View
Perspectives in the Collections of the Kuopio Art Museum
From 1 March 2018
The Kuopio Art Museum has recently opened a new and extensive exhibition entitled ‘The Artist’s View’ presenting a selection of the approximately 7,000 artworks in the museum collection. The exhibits represent works from the early decades of Finnish visual art to the present day. The works on show tell us how artists have viewed and seen their surroundings, other people and their inner selves in different periods. Visual perception and emotional experience alternate in the artists’ modes of depiction, and prevailing ideologies are reflected in the forms of artistic expression.
The exhibition features six thematic areas. The section on nature tells how critical comments on the environment by contemporary artists have come to accompany the traditional romantic experience of nature and the pure observation of the landscape. Urban life introduced into art admiration of technology and machine culture, themes of construction and architecture and the abstract idiom of form. Human depiction in art is a timeless theme. Portraits reflect the artist’s sensitivity to perceiving the subject’s personality and emotions. The classics of the collection are reminders of a time when they, too, were works of contemporary art. On display from the museum’s large collection of prints are works by well-known artists representing serigraphy. The Contemporary Art section with its changing exhibitions is connected to the Brothers von Wright exhibition on show at the museum from 24 March to 2 September 2018. The legacy of the von Wrights and the study of nature are carried on in the work of many contemporary artists.
Joint Effort
Jouni Airaksinen, Antti Rönkä and Arto Väisänen
16 February-12 May 2019
This exhibition is a synthesis of work by three artists based in Kuopio. Their styles of expression and ways of making art are strong and individual. Jouni Airaksinen’s sculptures hover and challenge gravity while spreading into surrounding space like the roots of trees or line drawings that have fled from a flat, two-dimensional surface. Antti Rönkä is a precise and analytical painter, whose works do not meander but instead keep to the point that he has defined for them. The subjects and themes are words, geometric forms and the formulas of physics. The works are matter-of-fact and minimalist but by no means unambiguous. Arto Väisänen is known as a distinctive draughtsman and an artist working with line. Constructed with delicate thin lines, his works are like breaths. Alongside them, the pieces filled with deep black mycelia draw all the light and lead the minds of viewers to landscapes that can be interpreted as melancholy but also as restful.