Zoom

Green Lake

2007

Elina Brotherus

Photography

83,3 x 103,3 cm

In her first works, at the end of the 1990s, Elina Brotherus did a lot of self-portraits and “autobiographical” photography inspired by the intimate events of her personal life. Later she began to work on “classical” subjects such as landscapes, portraiture or still lifes.
At the juncture of these two directions, she questions, as in the work Green Lake, the relationship between the landscape and the human being, between form and light, between the universe and the individual.
“The human body, in its beauty and in its banality, never ceases to be profoundly fascinating”. E.B.

Elina Brotherus

Born in 1972

Born in Helsinki, Finland.
Lives and works between Helsinki and Paris.

Elina Brotherus uses photography and morerecently video to explore an individual's emotional landscape and feelings andseeks to determine where they fit in the overall jigsaw formed by others. Usinga deliberately structured language, Brotherus uses her art to reflect events inher life. Although her self-portraits dominate her work, she never castsherself in a role or stages a setting. Her landscapes are as much a reflectionof her feelings and sentiments. In her recent series, Elina Brotheruschallenges both the code of aesthetics inherent to paintings and the way inwhich beauty is perceived to explore the notion of reality and how it isrepresented.

Elina Brotherus holds an MSc in Chemistry from the University of Helsinki (1997) and an MA in photography from the University of Art and Design in Helsinki (2000). She has been exhibiting her work since 1998.