Rauha Mäkilä
Syksy 2025 (Autumn 2025)
Helsinki Contemporary
5 - 28 September 2025
Photo courtesy of Helsinki Contemporary
Tavantakainen, 2025
Oil on canvas, 80,5 cm x 60,5 cm
Photo: Jussi Tiainen
© Rauha Mäkilä, courtesy of Helsinki Contemporary
Piilovaihe, 2025
Oil on canvas, 71 cm x 51 cm
Photo: Jussi Tiainen
© Rauha Mäkilä, courtesy of Helsinki Contemporary
Rauha Mäkilä’s solo exhibition Syksy 2025 (Autumn 2025) presents new works united by a common theme: exploring memories through painting.
Rauha Mäkilä draws inspiration from visual notes and photographs, transforming fleeting snapshots of fast-paced moments into painterly form. Unfolding slowly and deliberately, her paintings emphasise process, materiality, colour and composition.
For Rauha Mäkilä, painting is an antidote to the perfection-driven flood of digital images. Like a book, a painting demands time: it can challenge us, and transport us to another place and time.
Halloween 2024, 2025
Oil on canvas, 240 cm x 200 cm
Photo: Jussi Tiainen
© Rauha Mäkilä, courtesy of Helsinki Contemporary
Chaplin 1982, 2024
Oil on canvas, 230 cm x 200 cm
Photo: Jussi Tiainen
© Rauha Mäkilä, courtesy of Helsinki Contemporary
Colour is often her point of departure. As she paints, Rauha Mäkilä tests how colours interact to generate different moods and spaces. Too much harmony can be dull. Instead, rhythmic shifts, small imperfections, and even deliberately “wrong” colour choices create compositional vitality. Her works are always constructed in the language of painting: in the brushstrokes across the canvas, in the connections between shapes and colours, in the ways diverse elements support one another, and in what they ultimately convey.
Some of Mäkilä’s new works depict sculptures; others are “meta-paintings,” or paintings of paintings. These do not comment on the art world as such, but probe deeper questions of perception: how we see, what we value, and why. In the end, Mäkilä’s practice reminds us that what we encounter is not reality, but a constructed image—above all, a painting.
HELSINKI CONTEMPORARY
Bulevardi 10, 00120 Helsinki
