The Helsinki City Art Museum is proud to present Album, a new series of photographs by the Norwegian Fin Serck-Hanssen (1958) at Art Museum Tennis Palace. Album comprises nearly forty tight-cropped close-ups of human skin. The large photographs are both intimate and anonymous – they come extremely close but still keep their distance.

Fin Serck-Hanssen has said, ”I just want to get a bit too close” of the works in the Album series 2001–2002. Intimacy and giving visibility to minute things are distinctive of theses images. While they come as close to the skin as is possible, the draw away from the subject, and in the extreme, they become almost abstract and even unrecognizable.

The photographs in the Album series examine physical presence. They do not portray flawless human beings but landscapes of different skins: ruptured blood vessels, chapped lips, a shining bald dome of a head, stubble on a chin and a wrinkled neck. The images of flesh are reminiscent of nature close-ups and the surfaces of inanimate objects.

The skin is a boundary that conceals, protects and remembers but also communicates, reveals and insinuates. The knowledge that the artist's models include his father and others close to him opens up a perspective of memory and memories on the works and the title, Album.

Fin Serck-Hanssen has shown in countless exhibitions around Europe since the beginning of the 1980s and many diverse collections include his photographs (e.g. Victoria & Albert Museum in London, the National Museum of Photography, Film and Television in Bradford and the National Museum of Contemporary Art in Oslo). In Finland, Serck-Hanssen's photographs were shown in the exhibitions Tema AIDS (1994) and Desire (1995) by the Helsinki City Art Museum and the Nordic Art Centre.

The exhibition's producer is Stenersenmuseet, Oslo.

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