KVT – Exhibition by Maritta Nurmi at Art Vietnam

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Maritta Nurmi at Art Vietnam

Three years ago, expat Finnish artist Maritta Nurmi mounted the final exhibition at the old Art Vietnam gallery and allowed that space to close its doors in a top-to-bottom, floor-and-wall-covering whirl of color and design that left your senses delightfully reeling.

Her new exhibition at new Art Vietnam is called ‘After the End of Art Anything Goes’ and so in the same vein I’ll give an ‘anything goes’ opinion.
Maritta is a late career artist who entered the fray after a working life in metals. Her early work featured canvasses overlaid with copper and silver leaf and then painted on in acrylics. Her organic and geometric abstracts were very arresting and popular.

But it’s her use of ready mades that make me enamoured of her work. She’s a bit in the mold of Marcel Duchamp and I’d be interested to see what she’d do with a makeover of his most iconic and famous bit of porcelain. This exhibition is a marvelous conglomeration of found and painted teeny wooden stools, collapsible wood and laminate student study tables, tin covered tables used at lau eateries around Truc Bach Lake, small metal discs and huge steel drying trays. Sometimes she uses a minimal approach when applying acrylic or nail lacquer to her objects and then erupts in a frenzy of color and design on others, particularly when overlaying surfaces laminated in commercial plastic motifs. On all of these she leaves sections of the original surface untouched and many are stunning.

A lot of the exhibition is a refinement of previous conceptual ideas. The student tables lead on from 2007, were re-invented for a critically successful European venture in 2009 and take on a vital reincarnation this year. The rose begins to be a frequent resident as painted object or as re-configured part of a commercial design. A Buddha outline makes an occasional re-appearance.

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The level 3 gallery sees the result of conceptual side-tracking with fabric. This was printed in India using designs and motifs from recent work and influenced by a stint with colorfully clothed west African women. It’s hung tapestry-like from the walls and works especially well. Maritta-ish fashion creations using the material form a great suspended installation. Perhaps the cream of the crop are the student tables painted as echoes.

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Rosalie Gascoigne is one of my favorite artists who also started an art practice in mid career. She predominantly used found objects and materials in her work. Her manipulation of abandoned yellow and black reflecting road side signs, a material that dominated her later work, was magnificent. She won a berth at the 1982 Venice Biennale. I consider that Maritta’s work has much the same poetic quality.

Maritta’s provocative exhibition title “After the End of Art Anything Goes” is one that reiterates post-modernism philosophy and, particularly in Vietnam, is a statement that young artists need to heed if the state of art here is to become world beating and not become stale re-inventions and repetitions of the known – or pallid copies.

Definitely an exhibition to be seen and enjoyed and I hope you like those wall mounted stools as much as I do. A lot has already been sold to canny buyers and I’d love, in post-modern vein, to have one of those drying trays as a glass covered dining table top. What a great statement it would be!