Toni R. Toivonen
Gutting a Rotten Horse Generated
The Most Horrific Migraine
With The Most Beautiful Aura
Upside Down Into a Landscape, 2024
Brass and original substance from a dead animal
500 x 250 cm
Co-produced by Frankfurter Kunstverein
Courtesy Toni R. Toivonen and Galerie Forsblom
The Rivers and Streams of a Dissolved Mind, 2024
Brass and original substance from a dead animal
100 x 126 cm
Courtesy Toni R. Toivonen and Galerie Forsblom
The Perfect Moment, 2022
Brass and original substance from a dead animal
400 x 200 cm
Courtesy Nelimarkka Foundation
Mother, 2022
Brass and original substance from a dead animal
300 x 200 cm
Courtesy Private Collection, Finland
Metascape (3), 2022
Brass and original substance from a dead animal
32 x 38,5
Courtesy Private Collection, Finland
Crucifixion, 2018
Brass and original substance from a dead animal
300 x 400 cm
Courtesy Sara Hildén Art Museum
21 Strangers (In My Head), 2024
Brass and original substance from a dead animal
48 x 61 cm
Courtesy Toni R. Toivonen and Galerie Forsblom
The Agony And The Ecstasy, 2024
Brass and original substance from a dead animal
500 x 200 cm
Co-produced by Frankfurter Kunstverein
Courtesy Toni R. Toivonen and Galerie Forsblom
Toni R. Toivonen: Miten kuolema kunnioittaa elämää? (Toni R. Toivonen: How Death Honors Life), 2023
Film, 17 min
Directed by Meeri Koutaniemi
Season 2, Episode 5 of the TV series Irti Kuvasta with Meeri Koutaniemi
Produced by Gimmeyawallet Productions, Executive Producer: Elise Pietarila
Courtesy Gimmeyawallet Productions
Toni R. Toivonen is a seeker. He creates images that pose the overarching question of what life is and what remains when it fades away. He creates images that reveal the unspeakable, for which there is neither image nor word, in order to capture the moment of transition between being and non-being and to outlast transience through the sacrality of the image.
For his central motif, Toni R. Toivonen has chosen the animal, either alone or in groups. Since the origins of mankind, animals have been magically charged beings, guardians and mediators of the connection to the spiritual world. Already in prehistoric times, people painted and carved animal figures on cave walls, turning them into sacred places. The artists were shamans.
Toivonen is a painter, but he does not paint the animals. Toivonen has a deep knowledge of the history of art and painting. He has mastered the language and meanings of colour, form, material and symbolism. But after years of painting, he has abandoned the artistic gesture of depiction by imitation. Allegory and symbols no longer meet his needs in his search for the existential. He allows reality to imprint its own image on the material.
The artist approaches the mystery of life with reverence. He creates the conditions to allow the cycle of life to take place. Everything is transformation. To see transience, not to avert one’s gaze but to find comfort in the natural cycle, is the fragile level on which Toivonen moves. Melancholy and sadness, despite beauty— sacred experience.
Toni R. Toivonen seeks forms of comprehension for this fundamental human experience: transience as the most immeasurable of all absences. His works bear the imprints of the living and allow them to become objects of silent contemplation in sublime beauty. The absent forms of the departed animals are deeply inscribed in the imprint.
Toivonen lives and works far from the city, in the solitude of the Finnish forests. His artworks arise from a deep connection with animals. They are companions and beings for whom he feels respect and love. None of the animals lose their lives for art. Some of them, horses and dogs, died a natural death after spending their lives with Toivonen. Others were brought by foresters or by people whose wish it was to eternalise their animals in memory. The sacredness of the moment of transition—from life to death—is a mystery for the artist, which he endeavours to approach with his paintings.
The artist places the bodies of the dead creatures on brass surfaces. He arranges them carefully. It is the bodies that change the metal. It is the substance that surfaces, of which all living things are made. It corrodes and oxidises the metal. Like an alchemist, Toivonen has studied and tested the mutual reactions of bodies and metal. His art is created during weeks of waiting and observing, in which the cycle of nature takes its course and the cycle of becoming and fading is immortalised in the metal. What emerges are monumental images, figurative or abstract. They are signs of an incarnation, yet they visualise more than mere allusions.
The colour gold plays an essential role in Toivonen’s works. From Ancient Egypt, the cults of the Incas, Byzantine mosaics and Christian painting from the Middle Ages to modern times, the beauty of gold symbolises the transcendent, the supernatural and the eternal. And so Toivonen’s paintings are not created on canvases, but on golden yellow brass plates. Brass has the property of oxidising on contact with bodies; it absorbs all imprints as shapes in its surface.
Image and death and the question of transcendence have belonged together since archaic societies (see Hans Belting, Bild-Anthropologie, 2001). In all cultures and at all times, people have searched for forms and rituals to make it possible to experience a connection between the here and now and the hereafter of a spiritual order through images. Toivonen’s works are imprints and symbolise the endurance of the ephemeral.
“You need shadows to understand the light. In a way, you have to recognise death in order to understand life”, says Toivonen.
Toni R. Toivonen (b. 1987, Helsinki, FI) lives and works in Hämeenkoski, Finland. He completed his Master of Fine Arts at the Academy of Fine Arts in Helsinki (FI) in 2016, following his Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Arts Academy of Turku University of Applied Sciences (FI) in 2012. Toivonen has exhibited his work in several solo exhibitions in Finland and internationally, including in Stockholm (SE) and Vienna (AT). His works have also been featured in numerous group exhibitions, including the Ateneum Art Museum, Helsinki (FI), the Rovaniemi Art Museum, Rovaniemi (FI), and the Haus am Lützowplatz, Berlin (DE). His works are part of major public collections, such as the KIASMA Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki (FI), the Sara Hildén Art Museum, Tampere (FI), the Museum of Contemporary Art Kraków MOCAK, Kraków (PL), the Nelimarkka Museum, Alajärvi (FI), the Saastamoinen Foundation, Helsinki (FI), and the Wihuri Foundation, Helsinki (FI). Toivonen has received multiple awards for his art, which has been documented in the films HEAVY (Theo Bat Schandorff, 2018) and Irti Kuvasta (Meeri Koutaniemi, YLE, 2023).
