Inside Out
Kati Immonen, Michael Johansson, Teemu Mäenpää, Rauha Mäkilä
Helsinki Contemporary
December 1 - 22, 2023
Onnenkissa, 2023
Oil on canvas, 100 x 80 cm
Photo: Jussi Tiainen
Kindness, 2023
Acrylic and oil on canvas, 120 x 93 cm
Photo: Jussi Tiainen
Mirrorcube - Turquoise, 2023
Mixed media, 24 x 24 x 24 cm
Photo: Michael Johansson
Egg collection: Safe, 2023
Watercolour and ink on paper, framed with museum glass
61 x 56 cm
Photo: Jussi Tiainen
Helsinki Contemporary concludes its 2023 programme with Inside Out, a group exhibition featuring four artists, Kati Immonen, Michael Johansson, Teemu Mäenpää and Rauha Mäkilä, who reflect on interfaces between home and the outside world, the private and the public, and the way our surrounding reality is shaped through a lens of personal interpretation. The exhibition reminds us that while the world changes, home is a place that always retains its meaning, offering a refuge, a source of inspiration, and a safe harbour to which to return.
The show’s curator Mika Hannula comments:
“Inside Out moves from the level of the familiar and recognizable towards something new and out-of-the-ordinary. The content is themed around interiors and domestic details – settings that are familiar and ordinary to everyone. Intimate interiors and domestic nooks and crannies provide a trampoline for a varied array of connotations. Presented together, the featured paintings and sculptures take us in unexpected directions – the artists’ approach to the subject and the functions they invent for everyday objects are surprising, not to mention the visual guises. The close becomes distant, the familiar is made strange, and the mundane acquires a storybook quality – or vice versa.Filling the floors and walls of the gallery, the exhibits delve into the oft-forgotten, unnoticed details at the core of our everyday experiential existence. The exhibition captures life’s recurring events on an imaginary level, linking together the tangible and the utopian, realism and poetry. It moves from inside out, transitioning from the private to the public sphere, with imagination serving as the vehicle for navigating this transition. Inside Out is a visual journey that conflates form with content, engagingly and playfully revealing new perspectives and associations.The core tropes of the exhibition are ‘recycled’ commonplace household items that perform surprising new functions (Johansson). Or, applying a converse logic, ‘big’, inescapable themes are condensed in miniature, internalized form (Immonen). Inside Out also revels in the idiosyncratic qualities of everyday objects, celebrating their specificity through the medium and expressive tools of painting (Mäkilä). A painting can also serve as a window through which we observe an unknown but appealing turn of events that reveals kindness to be not an encumbrance but an exceptionally beautiful resource (Mäenpää).”
Egg collection: Vegetable garden, 2023
watercolour and ink on paper, framed with museum glass
61 x 55 cm
Photo: Kati Immonen
Kati Immonen is reinventing watercolour painting as a medium for contemporary art, leveraging the impressions of lightness and ease often associated with the technique. Immonen’s watercolour works are marked by direct and powerful expression, with themes ranging from war to ecological concerns and the richness of nature. Her creations, resembling fairy tales, often include a hint of dark humor and irony, weaving in warm humour in these rich, evolving depictions.
Kati Immonen (b. 1971, Jyväskylä) graduated from the Department of Painting at Turku School of Fine Arts in 1997. Her works have been widely exhibited in group and solo exhibitions in Finland and abroad, including at the Nordic Watercolour Museum and Turku Art Museum. Kati Immonen's works are included in several Finnish public collections as well as the collection of the Nordic Watercolour Museum. She has also realized several public art works, most recently including two EMMA-curated works 'Monument' (2022) as part of the Matinkylä Art Tunnels project, and ’Sheltered by Rhododendrons' (2022) in Laajalahti, Espoo. Thank you to the Arts Promotion Centre Finland (Taike) for supporting the artist’s work.
Crossfade - Transparent III, 2023
Mixed media, 22 x 22 x 22 cm
Photo: Michael Johansson
Michael Johansson deals with ordinary objects we all recognize, but in a way far from the ordinary. Driven by the agenda to densify the world, objects are morphed into precisely stacked rectangular shapes, connected to a certain place, where their original purpose are transformed into catalysts of new meanings. Found objects within the same colour range are reconstructed into a homogeneous image of a fictional life reinforced by our collective imaginary: the compressed scenery from a time gone by.
After studying at the Art Academy in Trondheim, Norway, and Kunsthochschule Berlin Weissensee in Germany, Michael Johansson (b. 1975, Trollhättan, Sweden) earned his master's degree from Malmö Art Academy, Sweden, in 2005. Since then, he has participated in several residencies and has exhibited frequently both within Sweden and internationally. Some of his most notable solo exhibitions have been held at the Museum Voorlinden, Netherlands and Göteborg Art Museum, Sweden. He has also realized several public art works, including ’Some Assembly Required – Déjà Vu’ (2020) at The Regiment Park in Tuusula, Finland. Johansson currently resides and works in Berlin, Germany.
Coconuts, 2023
Acrylic and oil on canvas, 150 x 120 cm
Photo: Jussi Tiainen
Teemu Mäenpää’s roots are in street art, but he is also known for creating large-scale murals. In his paintings, he combines masterful technique with expressive and strong emotional expression, as well as intensive use of colours. His mixed-media paintings are endlessly detailed. The appeal of Mäenpää’s works lies above all in the impact of individual gestures. Over time, the painted surface reveals ever more subtle marks, concealed traces, and intentions.
Teemu Mäenpää (b. 1977) is a visual artist from Tampere who graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts, Helsinki, in 2008. Teemu Mäenpää’s works have been shown in several exhibitions in Finland and abroad, including Turku Art Museum, Gallery Halmetoja and ARTag Gallery. His works are in the collections of Tampere and Turku Art Museums, the Nelimarkka Foundation, Saastamoinen Foundation, and the Espoo Museum of Modern Art – EMMA, as well as in Seppo Fränti’s Collection at Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma. Teemu Mäenpää has also created several public commissioned artworks and was awarded the William Thuring Prize by the Finnish Art Society in 2018. The Arts Promotion Centre Finland (Taike) supporting the artist’s work.
Martta ja Roland, 2023
Oil on canvas, 70 x 65 cm
Photo: Jussi Tiainen
Rauha Mäkilä draws inspiration for her art from everyday occurrences, her own family and life, and imagery from popular culture. The essence of materiality and color is central in Mäkilä's paintings. She plans her paintings carefully in advance, but leaves room for surprise and coincidence – space for the painting to be and to become an event in its own way, via the means of painting. In recent years, Mäkilä has reflected on her own position and work as an artist. Cats, our life companions, have been given their deserved significance by featuring them in her paintings.
Rauha Mäkilä (b. 1980) is a Helsinki-based visual artist who graduated from the Finnish Academy of Fine Arts in 2007. Her works have been featured in numerous solo and group exhibitions, including at the Ars Nova Museum in Turku; Munch Gallery in New York; Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art in Kansas City; EMMA – Espoo Museum of Modern Art, and Landskrona Museum in Sweden. Mäkilä's works are included in several significant collections, such as the City of Gothenburg, HAM Helsinki Art Museum, Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma, and the Saastamoinen Foundation collections. The Arts Promotion Centre Finland (Taike) and The Finnish Cultural Foundation supporting the artist’s work.
HELSINKI CONTEMPORARY
Bulevardi 10 - 00120 Helsinki
