Annu Vertanen: My House

Annu Vertanen, 1998.

The State Art Deposit Collection

Graphic, woodcut. Two parts, each of which 153 cm x 90 cm.

Annu Vertanen (born 1960) is a renowned printmaking artist who has been awarded the State Prize for Visual Arts. She studied in the Kankaanpää Art School from 1980 to 1983, in the Lahti Institute of Design from 1998 to 2000, and at the Aalto University from 2005 to 2013. Vertanen, alongside Anita Jensen, is among the generation of Finnish printmaking artists that renewed the art and paved the way for printmaking that favoured large formats and was space oriented. Vertanen is considered a pioneer of painterly woodcut in Finland.

Vertanen’s large works often take up the entire exhibition space. She has described her working method as ’installation of wallpaper’, which is indicative of her rather ironic attitude towards the traditional manual printmaking techniques. The basic elements of Vertanen’s expression come from painting – and she actually began her career in the arts as a painter. Vertanen often prints colours on top of each other and not next to each other as has been the case with traditional printmaking.

Vertanen is also an experienced teacher of printmaking. She is currently Professor of Graphic Art at the Academy of Fine Arts of the University of the Arts Helsinki.