Kuopio Art Museum
Kuopio Art Museum is the regional art museum of Nothern Savo Province. The museum responds for the visual art services, including exhibitions, research and documentation of visual arts in the area. Art education plays a central role in the museum activities.
The art collections include primarily Finnish art from the end of the 1900th century to the present. Art museum presents continuously special exhibitions, mainly Finnish contemporary art: paintings, sculptures, installations, photographs and media art. The main themes of the museum’s collections and exhibitions are landscape and nature, and the relationship between man and his environment.
Art Museum is situated in the very centre of Kuopio in a former bank building, nearby the Market Square and the Cathedral.
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 Wednesday. Closed on Monday.
Admission fee
€ 8/5, free admission for persons under 18.
Exhibitions
The Artist’s View
Perspectives in the Kuopio Art Museum’s Collections
Kuopio Art Museum’s extensive exhibition of its collections is called The Artist’s View. It presents a range of art from the museum’s collections, which contain around 7,000 works. The exhibition features works from the early decades of Finnish art to the present day.
Art tells us how artists have viewed their environment, people, and their inner selves at different times. Visual observation alternates with emotional experience in the artists’ work. The prevailing ideologies of the time are also reflected in artistic expression.
The exhibition is divided into six topics. The Nature section shows how environmentally critical commentary from contemporary artists has taken up its place alongside depictions of traditional romantic nature experiences and pure observations of landscapes. Urban Life introduced admiration for technology and mechanical culture, construction, architecture, and an abstract idiom to art. The depiction of People in art is a timeless theme. Portraits express the artist’s sensitivity and ability to see their models’ personal character and various emotions.
The collection’s Classics remind us of a time when they, too, were contemporary art.
Museum’s large collection of Graphic Art showcases prints from the 1960s and 1970s by the artists who took a strong stand on society, violence and the pollution of the environment.
The works of Contemporary Art are from the turn of the millennium, when the visual arts expanded to increasing diversity. Photographic art and video art made their breakthrough into the field of contemporary art.
Conversations 15.2.-12.4.2020
This exhibition features works by five artists based in Helsinki, painters Susanne Gottberg, Irmeli Hulkko, Outi Pienimäki and Pirkko Rantatorikka, and printmaker Päivikki Kallio. All five are well-known and highly-regarded visual artists with long professional careers. Their works deal with various spaces and spatial experiences, time, momentariness, distances, light and reflections.
The artists have not held joint exhibitions previously, but over the course of several years they have met to discuss issues of art and culture. Their communication with each other in connection with inspiring themes has deepened thinking on content in the work of each one of them.
The artists have been inspired by Ari Tanhuanpää’s doctoral dissertation ”Huoli kuvasta: merkitys, mieli, materiaalisuus” (Care for the Image: Meaning, Sense, Materiality, 2017) that deals with problems of materiality of an artwork. They invited Tanhuanpää to take part in the exhibition by writing an article based on the conversations with them. The article is published in connection with the exhibition.
The exhibition features works from the artists’ output of recent years. Instead of a shared theme, they participate in the exhibition proceeding from their individual starting points as different artists.