Markus Kåhre, untitled

In Sculpture Quadrennial Riga 2016 Markus Kåhre plays with the viewer’s sense of time and space – his installation transforms the space to the past tense and deforms the familiar visual boundaries between reality and illusion, present and the past.

Markus Kåhre (1969) studied sculpture and philosophy in Finland. In 2008 he was awarded the Ars Fennica Award and his work is in the Kiasma collection of the Finnish Museum of Contemporary Art. Since 2000 he has worked as a professor in sculpture at the Helsinki Academy of Fine Arts. Markus Kåhre experiments with the behaviour of human perception, frequently introducing mirrors and other optical illusion techniques in his work. His works of art do not reference particular artefacts of the reality but instead create a new field of experience. Visually and verbally laconic pieces by Markus Kåhre have been compared to the practice of experimental theatre where the viewer suddenly becomes an active part of the performance. The message, or in other words the meaning, conveyed by his illusory installations fuses with the viewer’s emotional experience, and the main aim of his art becomes the subjective aesthetic experience.