Bio
VAPPU ROSSI (1976) is a visual artist working in Helsinki, Finland. Her work, although based on drawing, finds form in a variety of media: light boxes, paintings, graphic prints and media art animations. Site-specific, gigantic wall drawings and co-operation projects with dancers and musicians are also significant part of her work.
Key words to Rossi’s art are contemporary drawing, multidisciplinarity, expression, contemplation and ascetic colour range.
The study of change and passage of time, giving visual form for slow process or magical metamorphose, is characteristic for Rossi’s media art. Her videos are often silent or minimalistic of their sound world. The works are short, more like living paintings: the endurance of the loop is around one minute, not more than two.
Her themes handle basic existentialistic questions: presence and absence, birth and vitality, love and miracle – and, on the other hand, the fragility and evanescence of everything: the meaning, and the will to preserve, that results from impermanence. The main motif is human figure. The fabric of piled up lines, translucence, light and twilight are the visual core of Rossi’s work.
Receptive thin lines are the building material of Rossi’s drawn images: they weave a web that slowly gives the figures their form. Her work represents the medium of drawing in very large sense: as instrument of encountering, connecting and noting, as prosess and as spatial or temporal event; from lightning-quick
croquis mouvements to giant murals and anamorphic wall drawings.
The fabric of piled up lines, translucence, light and twilight are the visual core of Rossi’s work. Her art is graphic but delicate, both robust and detailed, even beautiful; her figures, though having strong feeling of presence, are often
on the edge, floating out of reach, to unconsciousness or transcendence. Rossi’s light boxes and stone lithography series show the beauty and mystery of twilight: the human-like figure flickering in darkness is sometimes more animal than human, a hybrid, whose sight rapidly meets the viewer; like a wild animal caught by camera flash or a rabbit hypnotized by car lights. Rossi’s work is multi-disciplinary, dealing timeless issues from a contemporary angle. Her expression is founded on her excellent drawing skills.
Rossi’s work has been presented in museums, galleries and festivals around the world. She has a master’s degree from Academy of Fine Arts in Finland and a bachelor’s degree from the University of Art and Design Helsinki.
Currently, she works as the Drawing Master of University of Helsinki Art Room.