Juri Markkula: Heavens

EVENT DESCRIPTION

Ora-Ora is pleased to present a new solo show by Finnish artist Juri Markkula, to take place in its Tai Kwun gallery in Hong Kong from 28 September to 29 October 2023. The exhibition is titled: Heavens.

The artist will be presenting new works from his Heaven series, wall-mounted sculptures of industrial heft, and overwhelming, ethereal beauty. Each sculpture is titled with a colour. Yet each defies colour categorization, and is illuminated and guided by experience and instinct.

The artist derives inspiration from the Swedish concept of himmel and the Finnish equivalent taivas. Each word holds a dual meaning, referring both to the paradise of an eternal afterlife, as well as the atmosphere and skies above us. This series therefore incarnates a physical and a spiritual realm.

Speaking of Juri Markkula’s new solo show, CEO and co-founder of Ora-Ora Dr. Henrietta Tsui-Leung said: “Juri’s artworks are captivating to the widest audience imaginable. He creates alchemy as much as he creates art. His sculptures have an almost magnetic quality, which first seizes and then takes a firm hold of our imagination.”

ABOUT THE ARTIST / ORGANISER

Juri Markkula was born in 1970 in Turku, Finland. He graduated from the Royal Academy of Arts in Stockholm in 2002, and now lives on the island of Gotland, Sweden. In his signature RGB works, Markkula navigates the trilemma of industrial, artistic and digital, applying a 360-degree high-resolution scanning process and a custom-built digital sculpting system to celebrate the brittle beauty of the ground in rural Sweden. He creates an amplified representation of nature, with the disjecta membra of trees synthetically emboldened and digitally maximized. In so doing, he heightens and augments colour to create a deepened, altered reality which simultaneously attests to the power of nature and of abstraction.

Major projects include the vast tiled glass plane at the entrance to Stockholm City Station, entitled "La Divina Commedia." His exhibitions with Ora-Ora include “Interaction” in 2020, a solo presentation at Taipei Dangdai (also 2020), Kiaf Seoul (2023) and several showings at Art Basel Hong Kong, including 2022 and 2023. Other exhibition venues include the Skissernas Museum in Lund, Sweden and the Gotland Art Museum (both Sweden, 2022), Konstnärshuset, Stockholm (2021) and Galerie Forsblom, Stockholm (2020).