Sculpture
To experience the remarkable conceptual and stylistic breadth of Ari Purhonen's sculpture since the early '80s is to realise how this restless, witty and inventive poet of the art form has consistently asked nothing less of himself than to re-invent sculpture from zero. Indeed, one has the overriding conviction that, despite their marked stylistic changes throughout Purhonen's distinctive trajectory as one of the country's most demanding and imaginative voyagers of contemporary sculpture, his precise, playful, suggestive and highly parodic sculptures constitute one continuous, highly rigorous, humorous and open-minded investigation of the complex shifting aesthetic, epistemological and cultural issues of the contemporary condition. When one negotiates the immensely impressive and subtle exhibits of this major show, one encounters (time and again) in the works' conceptual, spatial and visual configurations, an underlying post-Duchampian ironic wit that is central to the artist's sculptural practice in that it contests the traditional aesthetic 'givens' of the art form. Thus, Purhonen's deftly crafted and pun laden art is always critical of the chief tenets of Greenbergian formalism as it applies to sculpture. Indeed, Purhonen is constantly upturning the Greenbergian apple-cart: not only does he embrace illusionism, but he also transgresses several other related fronts. His characteristically engaging and poetic works often refer to organic forms and critique the prescriptive doxas of Greenberg's rigid rules for sculpture.
Therefore, in such major works as Tools of the Trade (1983), Skeptikotomy ( 1983), Time Machine (1984) and World (1989), to name a few, Purhonen 's theoretical drive to question Greenberg's paradigm of formalist purity is clearly pronounced. For example, the first striking evocative and ingenious piece, Tools of the Trade, comprises four sets of tongs (which are hanging on