CELEBRATIORY EXHIBITION OF THE CITY OF PORI’S 425TH ANNIVERSARY

PRESS RELEASE

To celebrate the 425th anniversary of the City of Pori, the Pori Art Museum has put together a commemorative exhibition of the city’s collection to shed light on the nature of the collection. The exhibition cannot, of course, give a complete picture of the collection, but is a kind of sampling of about one fifth of the almost 800 works in the collection.

In Pori, the conscious creation of a municipal art collection can be considered to have begun in 1959, when the city’s Fine Arts Commission was set up. Between 1959 and 1980, the committee acquired a total of 522 works of art, which form the core of the city’s art collection. With the opening of the Pori Art Museum in the summer of 1979, the city’s art collection was surrounded by the necessary acquisition, storage, research and display organisation. Since 1981, the Fine Arts Section of the Cultural Board, which acts as the management board of the Pori Art Museum and the Pori Art School, has been responsible for building up the collection.

The Pori Art Museum is a regional museum in Satakunta with a dual responsibility: the visual arts of Satakunta and a specific sector of nationally significant new visual arts. The reason for the latter is the contemporary art collection of the Maire Gullichsen Art Foundation, which played an integral role in the museum’s establishment, and its becoming the museum’s second core collection. In addition to the above, the city’s collection will receive new foreign art, partly through donations and partly through purchases. This small part is exemplary in nature and provides background and reference material for the Finnish part of the collection.

Works of art from the city’s collection are housed both in public spaces and in the Art Museum to complement the museum collections. The collection has been the subject of separate thematic exhibitions at the museum and small touring exhibitions in the region. During 1982, a total of 18 exhibitions from the collection of the City of Pori were organised in schools, libraries and kindergartens. The collection also serves international exhibition exchanges, e.g. in the framework of town-twinning activities.

The exhibition celebrating the 425th anniversary of the City of Pori includes a collection of almost 150 works, paintings, sculptures and prints from various agencies and institutions. The core of the exhibition consists of the Art Museum’s own collection and works on loan from the Satakunta Museum and City Hall.

Translated with DeepL