Soda can

Material

Marble and gold; 158.0 cm

Dating

2011

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.