The substantial project that Minkkinen initiated shortly before the advent of postmodernism and has sustained through the present pertains to many of the movements and issues of contemporary art and photography, among them performance art and body art, the construction of identity, and the male nude.
Cumulatively, however, his images also comprise an account of an epic journey – both a physical adventure in the natural and urban world and a psychological voyage of the lone human spirit. “Saga” explores all those facets of his work, clarifying its autobiographical aspect, its cross-cultural underpinnings, and its documentation of this artist’s often high-risk physical adventures in the pursuit of his potent and memorable images.
To celebrate the duration of Minkkinen’s project and to highlight its underlying mythic structure, co-curators A. D. Coleman and Todd Brandow have configured this 120-print selection from his oeuvre as a long, unified visual poem. In it, they bring together a distinctive mix of Minkkinen’s iconic, immediately identifiable pictures, lesser-known pieces, and previously unpublished and unexhibited work presented here for the first time – including a generous selection of images produced from 2000 to the present. More than one-third of these works have not heretofore appeared anywhere.
This exhibition, which also functions as this artist’s mid-career retrospective, represents the first comprehensive, large-scale overview of Minkkinen`s germinal and influential imagery from the last three and a half decades.
