Elina Brotherus, Joseph Beuys and gallery owner René Block
Potato Planting – Transformations

Museum Schloss Moyland
16 September 2023 – 25 February 2024

Some of the works Elina Brotherus produced during Resonance: Finland 2023, presented by The Wapping Project with the support from Kone Foundation, form part of her upcoming exhibition at Museum Schloss Moyland near Düsseldorf in Germany.

In her recent bodies of work, Elina has been reinterpreting scores for performance works, including Fluxus event scores. For the exhibition at the Museum Schloss Moyland, she has also restaged Joseph Beuys‘s action Kartoffelernte (Potato Harvest), which originally took place in front of René Block’s gallery in Berlin in 1977. The legendary curator and gallerist, Block, collected and supported the work of both Beuys and Brotherus at the early stages of each of their careers.

Elina Brotherus works in photography and moving image. Her work has been alternating between autobiographical and art-historical approaches. Photographs dealing with the human figure and the landscape, the relation of the artist and the model, gave way to images on subjective experiences in her recent bodies of work Annonciation and Carpe Fucking Diem. In her current work she is revisiting Fluxus event scores and other written instructions for performance-oriented art of the 1950s-70s. Another ongoing interest is photographing in iconic houses by architects like Alvar Aalto, Hundertwasser and Michel Polak. Brotherus takes roles of various imagined characters, thus bringing a tranquil human presence to the spaces. Elina has been exhibiting widely since 1997 and her work is represented in major public collections including the Centre Pompidou, Paris, Moderna Museet, Stockholm, MAXXI, Rome, Fondacion ARCO, Madrid, Hasselblad Center, Gothenburg, Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki, Musée de l’Elysée, Lausanne, and Museum Folkwang, Essen, to name a few.