Exhibition review Tove Jansson and Tuulikki Pietilä are an iconic female couple, but the love between women is rarely discussed in art exhibitions: the whole that opened in Ekenäs makes an exception

Culture|Exhibition review

Visual arts

The love of women 30.4. until the gallery in Elverket (Kustaa Vaasan katu 11, Ekenäs). Wed – Sun 11–17.

Ekenäs

Tove Jansson (1914–2001) and Tuulikki Pietilä (1917–2009) are an iconic female couple in Finnish art history. The love affair, which began in the 1950s, lasted for nearly fifty years, until the end of the spouses ’lives.

Jansson and Pietilä lived a significant part of their relationship in an atmosphere where homosexuality was treated as a crime. In Finland, the criminalization of homosexual acts was added to the Penal Code in 1894. When homosexual acts were removed from the Penal Code in 1971, however, a prohibition was imposed that public incitement to “fornication” of persons of the same sex was a punishable act. The ban was lifted in 1999.

Ekenäs Gallery Exhibition at Elverket Women’s love celebrates the decriminalization of homosexuality. At the same time, the exhibition highlights the cultural history of love between women, which is often with secretive gestures, hints, and small signs.

Juha-Heikki Tihisen the ensemble curated fills an obvious gap. Although the lives of male couples are now discussed in exhibitions at major museums, focusing on love between women is still confusingly rare.

Despite its name Women’s love however, does not focus on the lives of female couples as such. There is only one work in the ensemble that tells unequivocally about the relationship between Jansson and Pietilä. Kanerva Cederström make a documentary On the way with Tove (1993) takes Pietilä to Japan, Hawaii, Mexico and the United States.

Couples instead of exploring life or juxtaposing their works, the exhibition brings out the theme of love as a broader idea of ​​community. Jansson’s self-portrait in the exhibition Smoking girl (1940) also describes the starting point of love as a relation to man himself.

In addition to Jansson, there are works in the exhibition From Esther Helenius (1875-55), From Emma Helte (b. 1979), Marie Høegilta (1866–1949) and From Edith Hammar (b. 1992).

Born in the mid-19th century, the works of Helenius and the Norwegian photographer Høeg build a reflective surface on contemporary works of art, such as Helte’s softly rich nymphs and Hammar’s comic expression.

About their floral arrangements the famous Helenius reportedly had a love affair with the painter while living in Paris Martta Helmisen with. However, relatively little is known about the relationship. Maybe that’s what Helenius’s works are about, like Flowers in a vase (1947), which is attached in the exhibition to the idea of ​​the language of flowers. Flowers were a popular way of communicating in Victorian times, especially about things that were not appropriate to speak out loud.

A more carnivalistic and straightforward identity play is represented by Marie Høeg’s photographs, in which the artist is seen with her friends intruding on gentlemen’s tames.

Edith Hammar’s Mural, 2021. Picture: Ahmed_Alalousi

Great addition the exhibition features Edith Hammar’s large-scale murals, which feature the adventures of a comic book novel published in 2020 Homo Linen characters.

Hammar does Homo Line references to my gay Tom of Finland. The world focused on the sexuality of the male macho depicted in Tom of Finland gets a playful communal equivalent in the murals.