Contemporary Fine Arts in Basel presents Crimson & Clover, Finnish artist Anna Tuori’s first solo exhibition. Borrowing its title from the 1968 song, the show reflects Tuori’s practice, where warmth coexists with unease and beauty is shadowed by disturbance.Tuori draws from the absurdity of the present, treating reality as bordering on fiction. Her paintings develop through color, rhythm, and composition, blending thin washes with thick, tactile oil layers. They engage with still-life traditions and memento mori themes, exploring mortality within ordinary life.Animals such as cows, deer, and cats appear as depersonalized symbols of vulnerability, often shown as hanging carcasses. Works like Noble and Tragic, When It Happened Again, and Simply Another Sunday Morning balance brutality with intimacy, inviting reflection without offering closure.
Anna Tuori: Crimson & Clover. Solo exhibition at Contemporary Fine Arts Basel. Basel, April 16, 2026
Press text:
Contemporary Fine Arts presents Crimson & Clover, the first solo exhibition by Finnish artist Anna Tuori at the Basel gallery. Its title borrows from the 1968 song by Tommy James and the Shondells, carrying a note of sweetness touched by tension. That tone is close to Tuori’s practice, where warmth never comes without unease and beauty is often shadowed by disturbance.
Tuori’s work begins from the unstable texture of the present. She follows the news and absorbs what surrounds her, letting that pressure settle before it finds form. “The world is so absurd that it feels like fiction.” This sense of distance, where reality slips toward illusion, is not translated literally. It is the condition from which the image takes shape. Painting offers a way to hold conflict without resolving it too quickly. Wit, violence, intimacy, and fragility coexist without settling into a single meaning.
Her process begins with color and composition rather than with a statement. She approaches painting in a more abstract mode, allowing rhythm to guide the work before figures or objects come into view. Restlessness lingers, yet resists explanation. Colour sinks into the canvas, creating an immaterial depth, while thicker layers of oil push outward with tactile density. Each work emerges through a subtle negotiation: one movement withdraws, another insists.
A dialogue with the history of painting runs through the exhibition. Tuori is attentive to still life, especially the memento mori, yet she does not construct direct vanitas quotations. Her relation to tradition is broader and more organic. It emerges through weight, atmosphere, and the emotional temperature of each scene. Her paintings ask how mortality inhabits ordinary life, and how one lives with that knowledge amid comfort. There is an existential undertow here, but also empathy. The works retain tenderness even when they address harsh subjects.
Animals such as cows, deer, and cats recur in these paintings. They stand in for the human body, though in a depersonalized way. Through them, vulnerability becomes easier to share. This leaves space for projection without directing us toward a fixed identity. The animals appear lifeless, suspended upside down. Their carcasses hang with full mass, making gravity visible. This arrangement recalls classical still life while intensifying the emotional charge.
In Noble and Tragic (2025), the motif is brutal, but the palette and framing feel intimate, almost domestic. This tension is central to the artist’s vision. Horror sits within a setting of care. Other objects and decorative elements complete the staging, as if fragments of different times had gathered in one place. We follow these clues without being told what conclusion to reach. Even the bare borders mark a limit, reminding us that this is only one way of seeing.
When It Happened Again (2025) shows a deer rendered through minimal brushstrokes, as if whispering across the linen. Its title suggests a loop in which the past returns because it was not fully learned. Finally, Simply Another Sunday Morning (2025) faces the world through a window. Nature seems to enter the room. A floating hand paints, while Lady Justice hovers between witness and hope. It is an image of longing, and of possibility.
Crimson & Clover invites reflection without closure. What matters here is not the isolated detail, but the larger constellation each work holds in play, where what can be named meets what still exceeds language.
Text by Nicolas Vamvouklis
