The 2022 Summer Exhibition of Tampere Art Museum presents the works of two Young Artists of the Year. Kristian Krokfors (b. 1952) was the first artist to receive the award in 1984, and the exhibition connected with the it opened in Tampere Art Museum in early 1985. In this Forever Young exhibition, there are several works from the 1985 exhibition, but the emphasis is on paintings and graphic works produced by the artist in recent years.

Krokfors is one of those artists who polish their style into an ever more perfect form by concentrating on a specific range of subjects. He continues precisely and systematically to make graphic works, drawings and paintings of buildings, trees, cones, balloons and other objects that have become familiar during his early career. However, over the years, new subjects have appeared although the basic elements of his subject matter have remained. Krokfors’s works are at the same time both familiar and strange, real and unreal. Their subjects are representational but abstracted. The object of the depiction is concrete, but it conveys infinity. The works induce us to consider the nature of existence. It is a precisely a question of perceiving the world and its truths, as the art historian Tomi Moisio writes in the exhibition catalogue.

Kristian Krokfors has participated in numerous joint exhibitions not only in Finland but also abroad and has regularly held solo exhibitions, for instance in England, where he studied for four years. The artist’s works can be found in private collections and, for example in the collections of the Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma, Helsinki Art Museum and Tampere Art Museum.