Chapel of Remorse
by Jani Leinonen
Material
Glas and Wood
Dating
2019
About the artwork
Jani Leinonen’s Chapel of Remorse (February 2019) was installed in a 500-year-old barn in a small village of Madulain, in the valley of Engadin, Switzerland. The glass panels were cut to fit perfectly in the centuries old window frames. The glass panels of Chapel of Remorse are painted with old stained glass technique at Mayer’sche Hofkunstanstalt in Münich. What is now installed in the Grand Dolder’s wall is not only the stained glass artworks but also the centuries-old chapel-like architectural composition and shapes of the windows of a medieval Swiss barn.
About the artist
The Finnish artist Jani Leinonen plays with the systems of commodity exchange and celebrity and the marketing strategies through which they operate. He attacks symbols and marketing strategies, turning them into objects of ridicule, thereby creating clichés about our agreed marketing society and economic every-day. With these strikes, Leinonen unfolds the chain reaction we all are voluntarily involved in and plays up the iconographies of the global brand land. Leinonen’s installations are shops, bars, slot machines but also plain painting exhibitions. What is displayed, though, are not goods but an artistic allegorization that appropriates these marketing strategies only in order to unhinge their underlying assumptions about value and appropriateness. Leinonen graduated from Academy of Fine Arts in Helsinki in 2002. His works have been exhibited widely internationally, i.e. at the Nordic Pavilion at the 53rd Venice Biennial, Galerie Gmurzynska, Wilhelm Hack Museum Ludwigshafen and the Frankfurter Kunstverein.