Born 1980 | Lives and works in Helsinki, Finland
To create her exuberant sculptures and paintings, Helsinki-based multidisciplinary artist Jasmin Anoschkin (b. 1980) finds inspiration in folk art, pop culture, and toy design. Whether working with wood or ceramic, acrylic or oil paints, she improvises with her materials to create impressions of chimeric, surreal creatures. Anoschkin’s work pushes against the conventional aesthetics of Western commercial depictions of bodies (typically animal, but also human), reveling instead in diversity, hyperbole, and imperfection. The enigmatic ceramic sculpture Whitecurrant in the Garden of Nanny Still and Lonerva (2019), for example, evokes the monumentality of the reclining sphinx of Giza, yet it is tempered and made humorous by a pair of haphazard ears — or wings. The painted wood carving BabyBunny (2012) features a distilled animal form with outrageously oversized teeth, eyes, and ears; the latter are outstretched in a perfect perpendicular pose. “It’s exactly like fishmongers’ counters — with the stacks of smoked herring with the amazing gold-like glint,” she explains. “I have managed to capture that same magic in sculptures.”
Anoschkin invests a tangible tactility into her surfaces — they are lumpen, striated, scraped, and pinched, everywhere evincing the gesture of the artist’s hand. Her vibrant palette prioritizes gold and contrasting colors, and she often draws from chromatic combinations she randomly encounters in her day-to-day life. Recalling at once prehistoric figurines, fertility deities, contemporary children’s animation, and Niki de Saint Phalle’s voluptuous Nanas, these forms find a timelessness in whimsy and a gravity in the spontaneous. The artist has a turn of phrase she uses to describe her working process and the concurrent joy and sorrow that arises from her figures: “I gloomily combine the colors of the rainbow.”
