Connecting people through art 

Elina Brotherus

Baigneurs 1

Since the end of the 1990’s, Finnish artist Elina Brotherus has confronted photography and video with the subjects of classical figurative painting. A concern with light, colour and composition reveals a rigorous formal and visual language while operating within an aesthetic of the immediate – specific to photography – in which nudes and landscapes are captured from life, “surprised” by reality.

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In the video Baigneurs (2003), the naked bodies, seen from behind, free of any anecdotal or narrative connotation, enter and leave the field of an idyllic image of a Finnish landscape of luminous serenity. The artist concentrates attention around the immobile nature, filmed frontally with a static camera, through which the moving bodies pass. The human figure becomes the object of a purely formal investigation, similar to self-portraits in which a physical presence converses with the horizon in an atmosphere of calm and contemplation, a eulogy of a “window open to the world”.