Meri Hallenberg & Laura Lowe: Heavy Element

Opening on Thursday 2.3. at 17–19

Meri Hallenberg and Laura Lowe's duo exhibition Heavy Element is based on the artists' work in Japan in the summer of 2022.

The trip was funded by the Scandinavia-Japan Sasakawa Foundation and the G.J. Ramstedt Fund of the Finnish-Japanese Association. Also, many thanks to the Tokyo Japan-Finland Association.

Artists

Meri Hallenberg

Meri Hallenberg (b.1993) is a Helsinki-based visual artist, who works with painting and moving image. Her works are stories – or fragments of stories in the making – from the third millennium. Her themes deal with change and the passage of time; as time scales stretch to geological dimensions. Hallenberg’s paintings show a tendency towards material affinity with the phenomenon and the subject matter: they not only depict, but also imitate the phenomenon they deal with on a material level.

Hallenberg graduated from the Free Art School in 2019, after which she continued her studies in the Department of Painting at the Academy of Fine Arts, University of the Arts. She graduated in autumn 2022 with a Bachelor’s in Fine Arts and is currently completing her Master’s degree.

www.merihallenberg.com

Laura Lowe

Laura Lowe (b.1991) is a painter, whose work incorporates organic material – taxidermy, plants, and 3D prints into her paintings. Whilst working at the British Museum in London, she developed a deep interest in natural and cultural artefacts and began to examine how science and technology colour our way of looking at the world. Her work explores themes of metamorphosis and changes happening in our environment. Lowe is looking for a new painting language that resonates and responds to our time's experience of the world. She creates paintings that change in front of the viewer's eyes, which react to temperature or light, for example, or grow from the surface of the painting in a thick mass.

Lowe is pursuing a Master's degree at the Academy of Fine Arts, where her graduation work will be exhibited at the Kuvan Kevät show in May 2023. Lowe is a member of the Finnish Bioart Society.

www.lauralowe.art
IG @sixeyedcat