Akseli Gallen-Kallela

Akseli Gallen-Kallela (1865-1931) was a true homo universalis, a Renaissance man best known as a painter, but also an important figure in graphic art and an illustrator, and who designed his own live/work studios, furniture and soft furnishings. Over the course of his fin de siecle career, Gallen-Kallela progressed from realistic naturalism towards symbolism and linearity, progress particularly marked in his painted illustrations of the Scandinavian epic the Kalevala, and in sensitive portraits of subjects including Edvard Munch, Maxim Gorky and his friend Jean Sibelius. This long-overdue survey of his work appears on the 75th anniversary of his death, and on the occasion of the Holland Groninger Museum's full-scale retrospective, the first to bring such a large selection of Gallen-Kallela's work out of Scandinavia--and to the world.