Obituary|Juhani Palmu was known especially as a photographer of rural buildings and landscapes, as well as for his colorful private life.
The summary is made by artificial intelligence and checked by a human.
The painter Juhani Palmu died on June 26, 2024 in Kauhava.
Palmu was known as a photographer of rural buildings and landscapes.
In 1974, Palmu, the owner of an advertising agency, decided to become a painter.
Palmu was married six times and has one son.
Painter Helge Juhani Palmu died in the bed ward of the Kauhava welfare center on June 26, 2024. He was 79 years old, born in Turku on July 8, 1944.
Juhani Palmu was known especially as a photographer of rural buildings and landscapes, as well as for his colorful private life.
Drawing was a family legacy. Helge’s father, who went to art school, forced his sons Juhan and Jani to draw. Helge Palmu was an art dealer who ran a cafe-art gallery in Turku in the late 1970s.
From time to time, father retreated to “painting trips”. Later, the brothers found out that their parents had a secret job in Stella Polaris, the intelligence operation of the Finnish Defense Forces.
Juhani Palmun father was also a Jehovah’s Witness, and social issues were discussed a lot at home. This affected young Palmu’s world view. Although he left a sectarian family as a teenager, when he was forced to serve, he became a total conscientious objector because he considered democracy and the UN powerless to promote peace.
As a result, he spent “about a thousand mornings” between 1964 and 1967, according to his own words, in the Karvia workhouse. He used his prison time to study.
Before becoming a painter, Juhani Palmu studied theology and worked as an advertising draftsman in the 1960s. Palmu moved from Turku to Kemijärvi in Lapland in 1970, when the department store was looking for an advertising draftsman. At the same time, he worked as a religion teacher.
In the year In 1974, the owner of an advertising agency, Palmu, decided to become a painter. The Ostrobothnia milieu and the people who live there became a natural filming location.
“In the beginning, I felt that the people here didn’t realize what a great culture they grew up in. Elsewhere, migration has destroyed the landscape, but here the farms remain unchanged in the same families,” said Palmu in the 70th anniversary interview with Helsingin Sanomat in 2014.
Palmu studied painting Kalle Rautiainen and printmaker Onni Ojan as a private student and later studied in Cologne in 1991–93.
A palm tree the rise to fame was fast. After the exhibition organized in Galleria Strindberg in 1976, Palmu quickly moved through Stockholm galleries to European art circles. He received exhibition invitations to New York, Hong Kong and Beverly Hills and created fluently in the international art world.
Since the 1980s, he was a fixed star in the public eye in his home country, who didn’t hide his luxury cars and didn’t stay away from the pages of magazines where he talked about his jetset life.
This naturally did not please the Finnish cultural elite, who despised the commercial painter. Palmu didn’t care about this.
“I didn’t need the approval of an official body. I was not interested in the opinions of artists, but in their art”, he said in 2014. His own favorite artists were, among others Reidar Särestöniemi, Taisto Ahtola and Andy Warhol.
In 1998, Palmu bought the Strindberg art salon with its furniture and archives. There he presented, among other things, his own works Eero Nelimarkna letters. He closed the gallery in the summer of 2007.
A palm tree the lasting subject of the paintings, the Northern village landscape, settled in the already plowed terrain of Finnish art. After all, the masters of Ostrobothnian views were Eero Nelimarkka and Veikko Vionoja already created the canon of the subject and at the same time its popular market. Palmu’s teacher Oja was also known for his minimalistic house landscapes.
However, the look of Palmu’s paintings was more nuanced and hard-edged than his predecessors. A typical Palmu work was a clearly contrasting winter landscape.
In the late 1990s, Palmu changed the subject matter of his works and renewed his color palette. In decorative paintings dominated by red tones, nude figures and other subjects were combined with the world of signs and images of petroglyphs. The female figures were also reduced to tall, armless figures, whose background could be a familiar view of a house.
Overlays Palmu also experimented with more object-oriented art Juhani Harrin in violin-themed works composed in the same way. Palmu might have been inspired by the painting art of Särestöniemi, which he admired, to change the world of colors and subjects.
In the 21st century, Palmu basked in the public eye, but not because of his art. The messages mainly talked about his interpersonal patterns, financial difficulties and health problems. He still continued to paint until his last years.
From 1997, Palmu served as the vice consul in Hämeenlinna, Haiti.
Juhani Palmu was married six times during his life. He has one son.
#Obituary #Juhani #Palmu #solid #star #80s #hide #jetset #life