Finnish artist Anna Tuori’s first solo show in Berlin, Paradise News, presents twelve newly-commissioned paintings that navigate mortality, transience, and perception. Through sand-laced pigments, abstracted figurative scenes, and expressionistic still lifes, Sayori Radda explores how Tuori conjures a surreal space where death, illusion, and imagination intertwine.
A quiet sense of foreboding, offset by a oneiric calm, permeates the space upon entering Paradise News, Finnish artist Anna Tuori’s first solo exhibition at Contemporary Fine Arts in Berlin. Executed on unprimed canvas in oil, acrylic and, at times, sand-laced pigment, 11 newly commissioned paintings (all works 2025) explore death and the evanescence of life through expressionistic still-life compositions and abstracted figurative scenes in blood reds, pale sky blues, opaque pinks and greens.
Through experimentation with surface, depth, illusion and imagination, Tuori’s practice explores the manifold ways in which reality is perceived and how, ultimately, that perception defies universal truth and remains profoundly subjective and eerily abstracted.
Trained at the Finnish Academy of Fine Arts in Helsinki and later at an École Supérieure in Paris, Tuori draws formal cues from art-historical lineages including still life and memento mori – Latin for ‘remember you must die’ – a reminder of life’s fragility and mortality, mostly associated with 16th- and 17th-century Renaissance and Baroque vanitas still lifes.
Motifs include memento mori imagery such as animal carcasses of cows, lambs and deer, or animated skeletal figures that fill the canvas and conjure personified scenes. In The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore and Noble and Tragic, Tuori echoes imagery reminiscent of a butcher’s shop or slaughterhouse by depicting the corporeally decaying bodies of a cow and a lamb hanging by their shanks in suspension from the top edge of the canvas.
By using animals rather than humans as mortal flesh, Tuori disrupts individual identification and opens onto a depersonalised, macrocosmic view of the visceral precarity of the human condition. Drawing on Francis Bacon’s carcass paintings, composed of flayed or hanging animal bodies, Tuori thus explores violence within mortality and existence through a visual lens of putrefying, raw flesh.
Redolent of a triptych, a suite of three works in pale hues of turquoise and pink recalls the canonical symbols of mortality through personified, pensively seated skeletons, each skull sulkily facing downwards. Across these works, large, murky green vine leaves curl and dance around the mortal remains – an archaic symbol of life’s endurance, the cycles of time, decay and transience, as well as spiritual symbolism (in Christian contexts, the vine signals sacrifice, redemption and eternal life).
Elsewhere, perceptions of reality fold in on themselves and take form on a threshold between worlds. In both Simply Another Sunday Morning and Getting the Wind Back, Tuori experiments with interior versus exterior, surface and depth, as well as pictorial representation and canvas. The latter work renders visible a surrealist approach through a breakdown in clarity: an indefinite perspective looking into or out of a landscape; an illusory makeshift painted frame collapsing in on itself as it merges with the landscape in the background; and a red curtain in the foreground breaking in form and function as the makeshift frame cuts through its presence.
In Paradise News, reality reveals itself as a double-edged sword: neither distinctly here nor there, it gives way to the precipice of transient experience.
