This year marks the 30-year career anniversary of Heikki Marila (b. 1966), who ranks among Finland’s leading contemporary artists. It is only fitting, then, that he should celebrate his jubilee by revisiting a theme that has figured prominently in his oeuvre: floral motifs. Marila painted his first floral compositions over…

¨Jesper Nyrén (b. 1979) bases his paintings on nature studies. He resides on an island north of Stockholm, where he gathers materials, studies colors, takes photographs, and jots down notes to serve as raw material for his art, including detailed studies of everything from moss and stones to the shifting…

Jukka Mäkelä (1949 - 2018) ranks among the leading pioneers of Finnish postmodernism and neo-expressionism. During a career spanning many decades, Mäkelä continually renewed himself, his rich oeuvre varying radically from one period to the next. The recognizable quality shared by all his paintings is the idiosyncratic way they express…

Marianna Uutinen (b. 1961) achieves a consummate synergy between the materiality and spatiality of her paintings. Her art articulates space both through its presence as an autonomous physical subject and as something that straddles somewhere between subjecthood and objecthood – as if her paintings were spaces through which everything travels.…

This year Riiko Sakkinen (b. 1976) celebrates the 25th anniversary of the beginning of his artistic career. He held his first exhibition in February 1996 at the Jangva gallery. Sakkinen has kept a scrapbook copy of his first review, which was published in the paper Helsingin Sanomat. The review includes…

In his new exhibition, Veikko Hirvimäki (b. 1941) transports us back to the landscapes and memories of his childhood, to a time when people lived in closer touch with nature than we do today. Hirvimäki is a passionate conservationist who laments how contemporary society has estranged itself from the natural…

Leena Nio’s (b. 1982) new paintings are all about layers ­– both physically and symbolically. Layering has always been Nio’s signature technique, but this time the concept is taken to the next level. Nio experiments with a new technical idiosyncrasy in each of her exhibitions, with each painting taking its…

Rafael Wardi’s (b. 1928) paintings offer a commentary on painting, literature and poetry, a window to the past and the present, a glimpse into the artist’s interests and passions. His latest oil paintings explore history, featuring subject matter from floral compositions to angels, some assuming the guise of animals.

In his latest works Stig Baumgartner (b. 1969) combines precise, rational geometry with free, organic brushwork. The paintings in his Key Figures series are based on a compositional principle combining an identical number of interconnected horizontal and vertical blocks. This principle visually and conceptually symbolizes the human figure. The exhibition’s…

Jacob Hashimoto’s (b. 1973) latest works were born during the strange time of the pandemic, a time of existing isolation from each other and the outside world. His new works came into being when, alone in his studio, Hashimoto began reflecting on the course of human history and the contagious…

Raili Tang (b. 1950) has conjured forth an exhibition themed around the emotion of joy. The works in this show were painted last spring and summer as a conscious antidote to the fear and uncertainty that swept the world. Tang escaped the never-ending deluge of bad news by retreating to…

“My whole life is in my art. Some of my paintings go back a very long way – it has taken a lifetime to create some of them. I believe that good art is a force for positive change. That, perhaps, is the most meaningful impetus for my art.” Rafael…

Kaarina Kaikkonen’s (b. 1952) recent sculptures are conceived around tableware from her childhood home. They were inspired by the artist’s compulsion to smash and remold the memory-laden objects, thereby inculcating them with life lessons and reshaping them as an inseparable part of nature and the animal kingdom. In contrast to…

Jenni Rope (b.1977) paints by intuition, allowing her paintings to find their final shape through a spontaneous process. She begins by pouring the paint directly onto the canvas. Occasionally she has a color scheme planned in her mind, but it usually evolves in new directions as she adds one layer…

In his new exhibition The Island, the Greek artist Jannis Varelas (b. 1977) offers a gritty glimpse of family life in images of ordinary living rooms that revel in their banality. The anonymous characters mimic the poses of old portraits, yet they exude an atmosphere of jarring uncanniness. The artist…