LONDON.- Gallery FUMI announces an exhibition of works by Tuomas Markunpoika, marking the artist's first solo presentation with the gallery.

Unveiling a new series of works Contra Naturam explores the visually and conceptually captivating relationship between natural and artificial, craft and industrial materials.

Verging on the sculptural, the works in the exhibition bear the marks of their own creation. Building layers of ancient Moroccan Tadelakt plaster on a ductile synthetic material in a labour-intensive process, the artist works and reworks the form with spatulas and palette knives, etching the powdery fragility of plaster onto the seductively tactile surface of the finished piece.

Prized for its durability, owing to an entirely natural composition, the light-absorbing surface of Tadelakt seems shaped by nature's energy, as if aged, weathered and eroded by water and wind. The resulting duality of natural and man-made conveys conceptual depth to the richly modelled texture of the works.

Adopting rich colour variations, the collection exhibits a unified vocabulary of softly-edged, organic shapes - stripped to the essential, the works appear to simultaneously curve inwards and outwards, seamlessly blending into a fluid rhythm of line and angle. Engaging with notions of craft and value, and advancing the artist’s stylistic language, Contra Naturam offers a testament to the elegant complexity of Markunpoika's aesthetics.

A graduate Cum Laude of the prestigious Design Academy Eindhoven, Tuomas Markunpoika earned a nomination for ‘Best Contemporary Design’ from the Design Museum, London, in 2012. His work has since been acquired by prominent private collections worldwide and featured in important group exhibitions, most recently ‘Beauty - Cooper Hewitt Design Triennial’ at the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum, Design Museum Helsinki and Design.VE Biennial Design Festival.