Helsinki Contemporary (FI)

Helsinki Contemporary shows distinguished contemporary art by emerging and established artists from Finland and abroad. Spanning all artistic media, the core of the gallery's programme are artists who take an ambitious, in-depth approach to their work. The gallery focuses on creating international networks between artists, curators and galleries.

Bulevardi 10
FI-00120 Helsinki
(+358) 50 464 2911

info@helsinkicontemporary.com
helsinkicontemporary.com

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Curated for
CHART

For CHART 2021, Helsinki Contemporary presents a group show of work from artists Ville Andersson, Hannaleena Heiska, Rauha Mäkilä, and Camilla Vuorenmaa. This constellation of Finnish artists presents a variety of media, from photography and drawing to painting and carving on wood. The artists draw thematically from the shared experiences of their generation, as well as questions surrounding identity, relationships to nature, spirituality, and the intimacy of everyday life.

Ville Andersson (FI)

Ville Andersson often works with the concept of emptiness as a component of visual expression; the possibilities of silence and quietude are central themes in his work. Andersson is a versatile artist, both in his use of different media and the variety of styles he adopts. Characteristic features of Andersson’s aesthetic include: allusive tactics, an impression of rich nuance, precision, understatement and ephemerality. The soft, organic traces in his pencil drawings alongside the clear-cut, uniform shapes of his digitally produced images create a strong tension throughout Andersson’s body of work.

Ville Andersson (b. 1986) lives and works in Pernaja, Finland. Having graduated from the Finnish Academy of Fine Arts, Helsinki, he received the Young Artists of the Year Award and two museum solo exhibitions in 2015. In 2018, he was a Watermill Center artist-in-residence in New York, and was awarded an Inga Maren Otto Fellowship by Watermill in 2020. Andersson’s works are represented in major public and private collections Finland and the rest of Europe.

Flux

Archival Pigment Print, Framed, 72.5 x 100 cm
2020

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As quiet as a cloud floating across the desert sky

Archival pigment print, 105 x 70 cm (framed)
2020

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Blaze

Ink and pencil on paper, 39 x 30 cm (framed)
2021

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Glow

Archival Pigment Print, 70 x 56 cm
2021

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Hello Friend

Ink and pencil on paper, 34 x 24.5 cm (framed)
2020

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O

Archival pigment print, 97.5 x 110 cm (framed)
2020

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Shine on

Vinyl decal on paper, 54.5 x 39.5 cm (framed)
2020

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"Emptiness can be seen as a spatial and visual equivalent of silence. The bare white surface is never the same in shifting light. For me, as the quote goes, seeing is forgetting the name of the thing one sees. Characteristic features of the works aesthetic are richness of nuance, attention, precision and understatement. Less is enough.”

Ville Andersson

Ville Andersson, Desert Music, 2021, installation view. Photo by Jussi Tiainen

Hannaleena Heiska (FI)

Hannaleena Heiska’s paintings, drawings, video works and installations create illusions of captured moments, different worlds, and subcultures. She makes her paintings in a single sitting, “alla prima”, striving to achieve brushwork that looks effortless and easy. This gives her paintings the feeling of being a fleeting moment, and a sort of melancholy. Her imagery has been inspired by multiverses, artificial intelligence, the future, and the possibility of life after death. The new works explore timelessness, humanity and signs of utopia, with a starting point in the forerunner of sci-fi, the novel The Blazing World by Margaret Cavendish, from 1666.

Hannaleena Heiska (b. 1973, lives and works in Oulu) was one of the artists nominated for the biggest art prize in Finland, the Ars Fennica, in 2011. Heiska has exhibited internationally, for example, at the 4th Ural Industrial Biennial, Yekaterinburg, Russia, 2017; Gothenburg Art Museum, Gothenburg, 2015; Espace Louis Vuitton Gallery, Tokyo 2012; and the CAC – Contemporary Art Centre, Vilnius, Lithuania 2010. An extensive early mid-career retrospective was exhibited at Turku Art Museum in 2019. Heiska’s works are represented in many significant public collections, such as Gothenburg Museum of Art, Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma, Helsinki, Saastamoinen Foundation, Wihuri Foundation and Niemistö-collection.

I am the guardian of the sleeping fawn

Oil on mdf, 130 x 120 cm
2021

Photo by Jussi Tiainen

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The Blazing World I

Oil on mdf, 130 x 120 cm

Photo by Jussi Tiainen

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Camilla Vuorenmaa (FI)

In her practice, Camilla Vuorenmaa challenges the physical and traditional boundaries of painting. Her carved wood paintings are hybrids of sculpture and painting that require time and physical strength to create. The style is rough and unvarnished, endowed with a playful decorativeness, the palette rich and striking. Vuorenmaa depicts people and humanity in her work. She searches for motifs in magazines and books and by taking photographs of her surroundings. In her working process, it has become increasingly important to face fundamental questions by meeting and observing her subjects in authentic situations. In the most recent series of paintings the artist has explored Carrie Fisher’s eventful and tragic life which was entagled with the most famous fictional female action figure, princess Leia.

Camilla Vuorenmaa (b. 1979, lives and works in Helsinki) was nominated for Finland's biggest art price Ars Fennica in 2017. In 2015 Vuorenmaa received the Finnish Academy of Fine Arts Prize and in 2018 she was awarded a William Thuring prize. She also won the International Solo Award 2013 at the Spring exhibition at Kunsthal Charlottenborg in Copenhagen. Vuorenmaa’s major solo exhibitions include Joensuu Art Museum (2021), EMMA – Espoo Museum of Modern Art, Finland (2016) and Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Copenhagen, Denmark (2014). Her work has also been seen in group exhibitions such as Landskrona Konstmuseum, Bury Art Museum & Sculpture Centre, Manchester, England, Edsvik Konsthall, Sollentuna, Sweden. Vuorenmaa’s works are found in collections such as the Gothenburg Museum of Art, Saastamoinen Foundation, EMMA – Espoo Museum of Modern Art, Amos Anderson Art Museum, Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art and Helsinki Art Museum.

Hilma (af Klint)

Painting and carving on wood, 114 x 120 cm
2020

Photo by Jussi Tiainen

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Rauha Mäkilä

Rauha Mäkilä is known for her brightly coloured paintings depicting everyday occurrences, drawing from both popular culture and the artist’s own life and family. Her works, often featuring children, reveal the profound sincerity of their subjects, and an unreserved glorification of the joy of being young. Recently, Mäkilä has reflected on her own position and work as an artist. Her hectic neon world has occasionally shifted towards earthier tones, revealing the more sombre mysticism of youth, the silent strength, and the vacillation between different roles.

Rauha Mäkilä’s (b. 1980, lives and works in Helsinki) works have appeared in numerous solo and collective exhibitions in Finland and abroad, including: the Munch Gallery, New York, 2011; Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, USA, 2015; EMMA – Espoo Museum of Modern Art, Espoo, Finland, 2015; Landskrona Museum, Sweden, 2017 and Galleri Thomassen, Gothenburg, Sweden, 2017. Her works are included in major collections in Finland, e.g. the Saastamoinen Foundation, Wihuri Foundation, and Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma, as well as the City of Gothenburg Art Collection, Sweden.

Nice Try 2

Acrylic and oil on canvas, 140 x 120 cm
2021

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Nice Try 3

Acrylic and oil on canvas, 130 x 120 cm
2021

Photo by Jussi Tiainen

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Helsinki Contemporary (FI)

Curated forCHART