ARNO RAFAEL MINKKINEN

Written By ellen-k willas
Arno Rafael MInkkinen - Tree Climber Fosters Pond 2022 - Courtesy WILLAS contemporary

Arno Rafael Minkkinen - Tree Climber Fosters Pond 2022 - Courtesy WILLAS contemporary

“Art is risk made visible”

By restricting himself to self-defined limitations, he seeks to keep everything the same, and yet every picture is always different. I know of no one in the history of art whose persistence of vision and practice has extended nonstop for Two Hundred Seasons.

While his art can be seen as part of the conceptual approaches taken by artists such as Bruce Nauman, Lucas Samaras, and Cindy Sherman, Minkkinen is Minkkinen, flouting all and any classification. Arno is pure poetry, and his oeuvre is an enduring, contemporary homage to the relationship between nature and humankind.

— Ellen K Willas

Arno Rafael Minkkinen Kerttu, Koli, Finland, 2011 Courtesy WILLAS contemporary

Biography

Arno Rafael Minkkinen is a Finnish-American photographer, essayist, educator, and curator with well over 100 solo shows and 200 group exhibitions at galleries and museums worldwide. He holds a Master of Fine Arts degree from Rhode Island School of Design, studying there with Harry Callahan and Aaron Siskind. His teaching career began in Finland (1974-76) at the University of Industrial Arts in Helsinki (Aalto University today). He served as an assistant professor at the MIT Creative Photography Lab (1977 to 1981) where monthly exhibitions, high-profile lecture series, and a graduate program were initiated, including the New American Nudes exhibition and catalog Minkkinen curated in 1981 through Morgan & Morgan. The CPL years are part of the ongoing new MIT Museum’s retrospective exhibitions. Currently Nancy Donahue Emeritus Professor of Art at the University of Massachusetts Lowell (1987 to 2015) and docent at Aalto University (1992 to the present, Minkkinen also served as a visiting professor at Vevey’s École d’Arts Appliqués in Switzerland (1994 to 2003) and later at the Bilder School of Photography in Oslo, Norway.

Major monographs include Frostbite (Morgan & Morgan, 1978), Waterline (Marval, Aperture, and Otava, and winner of the 1995 Grand Prix du Livre, Rencontres d'Arles), Body Land (Motta, Nathan, and Smithsonian Institution Press, 1997), SAGA: The Journey of Arno Rafael Minkkinen: Thirty-Five Years of Photographs (Chronicle Books, 2005), Homework: The Finnish Photographs, 1973 to 2008; Balanced Equation (Lodima Press, 2010), and Minkkinen (Kehrer Verlag –German Photobook Prize for Monograph of the Year 2019 | 2020 and Honorary Book Award from the Finnish Book Prize Jury in 2021).

Minkkinen’s works are held in over 80 prominent museum and institutional collections worldwide, such as the Musée d’art Moderne and the Georges Pompidou Center in Paris, the Musée de l’Élysée in Lausanne, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, the Center for Creative Photography in Tucson, the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, the High Art Museum in Atlanta, the National Art Gallery in Ottawa, the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography, and the Finnish National Gallery in Helsinki. Major solos have recently been held in contemporary art museums in Lima, Zagreb, and St. Petersburg, Russia along with 50-year retrospectives at Fotografiska Stockholm and Tallinn, Munich’s Kunstfoyer, and La Patinoire Royale in Brussels.

Minkkinen is a recipient of the National Endowment for the Arts Grant (1991), the Massachusetts Arts Council (1994), the Order of the Lion First Class Medal of Knighthood from Finland (1992), the Finnish State Art Prize in Photography (2006), the Lucie Award in Fine Art (2013), a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship (2015), the Pro Finlandia medal conferred on the Centennial of Finnish Independence (2017, and the Honored Educator Award from the New England Regional (2015) and National Society for Photographic Education (2019).

An artist talk with Arno Rafael Minkkinen & Ellen-K Willas recorded at WILLAS contemporary in April 2017.

Sizes and Prices:

Arno Rafael Minkkinen´s photographs are archival pigment prints on museo rag paper, luster surface. The prints are available as small prints in editions of 25 (50 x 60 cm) and the mural size (100 x 130 cm) in an edition of 10. Prices range from $5000 - 50.000 USD depending on size and place in the edition.

A few of the motifs are also available in an extra large size -approx 150*180 cm.

Installation pictures from ARNO RAFAEL MINKKINENS exhibition at WILLAS contemporary in Oslo.

MINKKINEN - monograph

MINKKINEN

This monograph is spanning five decades of work by the acclaimed Finnish-American photographer Arno Rafael Minkkinen (b. 1945).  The 330-page hardcover book depicts over 270 images since 1969 to the present with important works from all 50 years. More than half of the images are largely unpublished, including over 100 recent works since 2005, with numerous discoveries from the 1980s and 1990s, plus significant groundbreaking images from the early 1970s, years before the self-portrait entered the mainstream of contemporary photography.

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ellen-k willas https://www.willas.com
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