Heidi Lampenius: Ground Color
Helsinki Contemporary
22 November - 21 December 2024
Stairs I, 2024
Photo: Jussi Tiainen
Clay paint on canvas, 200 cm x 130 cm
© Heidi Lampenius, courtesy Helsinki Contemporary
Stairs II, 2024
Photo: Jussi Tiainen
Clay paint on canvas, 200 cm x 130 cm
© Heidi Lampenius, courtesy Helsinki Contemporary
Stairs IV, 2024
Photo: Jussi Tiainen
Clay paint on canvas, 200 cm x 195 cm
© Heidi Lampenius, courtesy Helsinki Contemporary
Color Chart I, 2024
Photo: Jussi Tiainen
Clay paint on canvas, 165 cm x 165 cm
© Heidi Lampenius, courtesy Helsinki Contemporary
“I like the way the paint glistens when it is wet, like dew-kissed mornings, but when it is dry, the colours become muted as the clay enfolds them in its own harmonious palette. Here lies the secret, the secret of the clay, the secret of the earth, conveying a sense of everything invisible in nature that we feel but cannot see.”- Heidi Lampenius
Ground Color presents new clay paintings by Heidi Lampenius. They reprise her signature symbolic language of painting that is based on the natural sciences and her experience of nature. The title of the exhibition is ambiguous: ‘ground’ can mean ‘earth’, but it can also refer to the surface used for painting. In this exhibition, earth serves as the ‘ground’ both conceptually and literally.
In her past paintings, Heidi Lampenius gave a visible form to invisible natural phenomena such as wavelengths of sound and light. The artist’s new explorations in clay reflect her quest for a new sense of groundedness – her desire to return to tangible basics. The paintings in the exhibition are composed around simple geometrical shapes that enclose folds and diagrams. Her abstract paintings conceptually represent her investigations into the hidden world of clay. While her forms are angular, there is great tenderness to her painting style and tonal scale.
The artist’s enduring themes – time, nature and memory – are revisited in series such as Stairs, in which the viewer can make out the shape of stairs simultaneously leading up and down, and in multiple directions all at once. For Heidi Lampenius, stairs symbolize harmonious cycles, their circular movement representing reassuring continuity and harmony – an endless cycle where what is at the ‘top’ and at the ‘bottom’ are inextricably linked.
Clay paint has the special quality of being temporally layered. Earth minerals are among the oldest pigments known to humankind. Clays, ochres, and earth and mineral pigments are born through cycles of elements spanning vast expanses of time. Heidi Lampenius thus takes the viewer on a long journey across peatlands, fields and bedrock, through millennia of folklore, and through geological epochs stretching far back beyond human history.
HELSINKI CONTEMPORARY
Bulevardi 10, 00120 Helsinki
