Cereal packages

Material

Acrylic on product packages; variable dimensions

Dating

2009-2010

About the artwork

A Series where the artist used characters and mascots of commercial products in their natural environments to create signifiers of the viewers’reliance on their collective unconsciousness. By allowing the viewer to expect one thing, while presenting a slightly altered, but highly different version, Leinonen has created a simile for the pervasiveness of images in contemporary society, and the ease with which they can and are subverted.

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.