Visual Peace is part of Finlayson Art Area 2022, Galleria Himmelblau, Finlaysoninkuja 9, floor 2B, Finlayson alue, Tampere.
Until August 28 (Tuesday–Friday 11–18; Saturday and Sunday 12–18).
Sebastian Schultz has brought to Finlayson Art Area a spectacular set of new paintings, the most recent of which were completed just before the event began. Schultz has named his exhibition after the peace researcher Frank Möller’s book Visual Peace. Among other things, Schultz approaches the visualization of peace through the hip-hop culture he is familiar with. The subject of the works is peace and how it can be visualised by means of realistic painting. Sound art for the works Peace and La Famille Schultz created together with Santeri Jarkko Pilli.
In the title work of the exhibition, Peace, a serene summer day has turned into a quarrel at a garden table. With this work, Sebastian Schultz participates in the Image & Peace project at Tampere University. Schultz says that he paints at a fast pace, even aggressively. ‘Peace does not have to be peaceful’ is what he says. The artist explores different implementations, colours and visual methods related to the theme, and presents different perspectives on a state called peace in his paintings. The theme of the exhibition inadvertently became topical, since the war in Ukraine had not started yet at the time Schultz conceived the idea.
The exhibition illustrates how life is born of opposites and how it is never completely without conflict. According to Norwegian sociologist and peace researcher Johan Galtung, positive peace means the absence of structural causes leading to war, and negative peace the absence of armed conflict while structural causes nevertheless exist. Galtung’s research has focused on structural violence, which is often overlooked and unrecognised. Revealing and removing structures is an important part of the work for peace.
Sebastian Schultz is a visual artist from Tampere who works at Nansotalo in Nokia. He graduated from the Fine Art programme at the Tampere University of Applied Sciences in 2020. Schultz is known in Tampere especially for a 54-meter mural depicting the history of Tampere, which he made on a brick wall at the Tako paper factory in 2018. Schultz’s newest mural is located in Ratina on a retaining wall of the Tampereen Sähkölaitos electricity company. The work, which covers 750 square meters, was created together with OCTO and Tomi Lastunen.