WHERE ARE WE NOW

Etel Adnan, Joachim Bandau, Georg Baselitz, Amoako Boafo, Louise Bourgeois, Elina Brotherus, Miriam Cahn, Sarah Cunningham, Tracey Emin, Rainer Fetting, Tom of Finland, Oska Gutheil, Secundino Hernández, Leiko Ikemura, Justyna Janetzek, Eemil Karila, Kirsi Mikkola, Lars-Gunnar Nordström, Francis Picabia, Janne Räisänen, Aurora Reinhard, Julian Schnabel, Emanuel Seitz, Barthélémy Toguo, Tommi Toija, Lee Ufan, Stanley Whitney, a. o.

The WHERE ARE WE NOW exhibition at the Philara Collection in Düsseldorf provides a unique overview of the Miettinen Collection, presented here for the first time in such a comprehensive form. The show, which has taken over all the exhibition spaces at the Philara Collection and features around 150 works by more than 80 artists, opens in the spacious entrance hall with one of Collection’s core themes, landscape and nature. This thematic strand highlights the origins of the collection, founded by Timo Miettinen and his mother with a strong focus on Finnish landscape painting of the 19th and 20th centuries. Since 2004, Timo Miettinen has deliberately expanded the collection to include works of international contemporary art, which are a central focus of the exhibition. The works on view span a period from the 1980s to the present day, offering a broadly based insight into the multilayered complexity of the collection.

The collection has a significant focus on Finnish contemporary art, which often attracts little attention in an international context. This exhibition provides an outstanding platform for Finnish contemporary artists, including Elina Brotherus, Ola Kolehmainen and Tommi Toija. Elina Brotherus, who works mainly with photography, interrogates the boundaries between self-portrait, landscape and representation. Her images often explore personal narratives and link autobiographical elements with art-historical references. In contrast, Ola Kolehmainen explores architectural structures and their reflections, creating large-scale photographic abstractions of monochromatic worlds. His works are characterised by a meditative, almost minimalist visual language. Tommi Toija is known for his expressive, often grotesquely exaggerated sculptures, which use a blend of melancholy and humour to engage with existential themes such as vulnerability and loneliness. His figures have a childlike appearance but nevertheless also convey intrinsic, profoundly emotional and socially critical dimensions.

The exhibition is configured as a dynamic conversation between monographic spaces and areas with a thematic structure. Artists whose work is of particular importance for the collection, including Leiko Ikemura, Secundino Hernández, Rainer Fetting, Kirsi Mikkola, Georg Baselitz and Tom of Finland, have their own dedicated rooms. Secundino Hernández has been supported by Miettinen since early in his career, and the collection has one of the world’s most comprehensive bodies of his work. Among Hernández’s works featured in the exhibition is his cycle Lupis Ipsum (2013), representing the 12 Apostles and Jesus Christ, an abstracted, gesturally charged reinterpretation of religious iconography, based on works by El Greco in Toledo. Leiko Ikemura, another artist important to the collection, has designed her own space for the exhibition, where the juxtapositions of her paintings and sculptures create an atmospheric relationship of tension between dream and reality. Her works oscillate between figuration and abstraction and address existential themes of identity, nature and transience.

Alongside the monographic spaces, thematic areas distil the core strands of the collection and create atmospheric dialogues between differing forms of artistic expression. The bandwidth extends across constructivist art, abstract painting, portraiture, queer and political art, to design, fashion, and floral subject matter. The curatorial structure of the exhibition allows visitors to appreciate the collector’s diverse areas of interest, and to arrange the works to reveal unexpected new connections. It thus becomes possible to experience the extraordinary diversity of the Miettinen Collection, and the visionary outlook of a collector who has developed in-depth expertise in each of these artistic movements.

Curators of the exhibition: Linda Peitz, Florian Peters-Messer