Finlandia University Gallery announces holiday hours

Finlandia University Gallery will be closed from December 23 to January 3, 2018 for the holidays. The current 27th Contemporary Finnish American Artist Series Exhibition featuring the ceramic of Kristin Pavelka will be on display through January 13. The gallery will resume regular hours Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday 8 a.m. to  4:30 p.m., Thursday, 8 a.m. to 7 p.m. and Saturday 12 to 4 p.m. on January 4.

Upcoming in January

• January 18 to February 17
• Opening Reception: Thursday, January 18, 7 to 8:30 p.m.
• Artist talk beginning at 7:20 p.m.
• Onni Nordman SAUNA: DIVINE COMEDY

Onni Nordman’s Sauna: Divine Comedy is a series of paintings that set Dante’s Commedia, the 14th century Italian narrative poem, in the sauna. “The Commedia, for all its world-building, is also an interior drama,” notes Nordman. “The sauna is a pressurized space coequally infernal, purgatorial, and paradisiacal, built on three levels, housing figures who are naked and vulnerable, as well as serene and exalted.”  The Sauna: Divine Comedy series has emerged as a continuing response to the possibilities of splicing together fertile ideas. Rather than illustrate the Commedia poem, Nordman’s paintings use it as a matrix to tell a story with a cast of figures.  His language of materials informs our viewing experience.  “My job as a painter is to find a pattern, to create abstract loveliness and order, to find a design with which to create a dynamic, satisfying flatness.”