“The exhibition consists of artworks that are based on ten thousand drawings. The initiator of the project, Master, is a massive collection of ideas carried out in less than two years.

I remember hearing somewhere that mastering a skill requires ten thousand repetitions. Originally, the saying must have derived from karate. In the summer of 2020, whilst having tick-borne encephalitis, I started to implement the idea of repetition by creating each day a set of ideas for my artworks. Every day, I would do twenty ideas until I had ten thousand of them. Would I then become a “master of ideas”?

In the work Master, a mythical search for inspiration, which is rather familiar from the artistic endeavors of Romanticism, has transformed into a disciplined implementation. I set clear rules for my repetitive practice: twenty numbered ideas per day, time recorded, same pen, and same pad. This self-compelled making also demanded a compassionate attitude: I allowed myself to come up with the kind of ideas that just happened to appear – completely shitty and boring ones, too. Despite the rules I set for myself, the effort was to push myself to work in spite of the circumstances and the possible lack of inspiration.

From the overall set of ideas, I picked candidates that eventually materialized as the works in my exhibition. For their execution, I used e.g. walnut wood, concrete, epoxy castings, and oil paints. I wanted to make the works by hand, by casting and painting, and by cutting and sanding wood.

In my works, the themes of personal memories and the relationship to nature overlap and are simultaneously linked to the theme of collections and obsessive performing. Player Piano, which consists of video and painting, deals with the connection between intuition and automation. The piece is a parallel work to the exhibition’s title work. In the sculptures Ghost Ship and Poor Child, recurring obsessions of childhood re-surface. In the work Collection, a collection of fifty insects meets the painter’s brush, one at a time. The work consists of an insect collection and a video work covering the painting process, as well as an audio work by Miikka Ahlman (f.e. M, Wurm).

There’s also comedy in the persevering and precise execution of ideas – the lines between systematic thinking, thoughtful human experimentation, and a grandiose joke are blurry. Although mastery can hardly be found through rigid performance, working on ideas through serial production makes one reflect on the human mind’s need to control the chaotic and unpredictable world through discipline and systematic cataloging and classification.”

-Antti-Ville Reinikainen

Antti-Ville Reinikainen (b.1980) is a Helsinki-based visual artist. In his work, Reinikainen often combines sculptural techniques with other forms of visual art, such as video and painting. Master is Antti-Ville Reinikainen’s nineteenth solo exhibition.

The exhibition has been supported by the Arts Promotion Center Finland.

The artist will be present at the gallery on Saturday 9 April 2022 from 2–4pm and on Sunday 24 April 2022 from 2pm–4pm.

Video by: Pia Männikkö