Roland Persson
Uninvited Guest
Helsinki Contemporary
3 - 26 October 2025
Helsinki Contemporary presents Swedish sculptor Roland Persson's third solo exhibition at the gallery titled Uninvited Guest.
Roland Persson is known for his surrealistic works based on hyper-realistic silicone casts of objects, animals, and plants. As an artist he explores the interface between consciousness and the subconscious, between humans and nature, and between the private and the public.
The works in this exhibition are partly built on Persson's childhood memory of his aunt's apartment where the furniture was covered with white sheets after the aunt moved to America. The eerie atmosphere of absence in the rooms of the home is conveyed in an installation where we see, among other things, goats walking on a bed. In the gallery, sheets are propped against the walls, resembling a theatre or film set. The pleated silicone, imitating white fabric, drapes, covers, and protects from view. In addition to goats, another animal roaming the quiet installation is the great cormorant, a bird widely regarded as a nuisance in the Nordic archipelago.
Persson's practice is about creating new worlds that strangely resemble reality. The aim of his works is to make the viewer uncertain about their observations. According to Persson, who is familiar with psychoanalysis and draws on it in his art, this uncertainty allows the viewer to liberate their own subconscious. Silicone is a contradictory material and it is well suited to depict the mystical opposites in Persson's art. As a material, it can reproduce details realistically—on the other hand, it is synthetic and "unnatural". The works entice yet can also appear repulsive, at once carnal and ethereal, strange and familiar, perhaps uncanny in psychoanalytic terms.
The exhibition also features drawings on wax-coated paper. As a technique, drawing appears very different from creating large installations, but there is a connection between the two: the drawings are often like abstract and instinctive instructions for the sculptures.
ROLAND PERSSON (b. 1963) graduated from the Umeå University Academy of Fine Arts in 1993 and has been exhibiting ever since. His work has been shown at eg. the Liverpool Biennial (2021), the Ostrobothnian Museum in Vaasa (2023), and Färgfabriken in Stockholm as well as Amos Rex and HAM Helsinki Art Museum in Helsinki (2024), to mention a few.
This year Roland Persson is nominated for one of the biggest art awards in the Nordic countries, Ars Fennica. His works will be on display in the nominees' group exhibition at HAM from October 24, 2025, to March 29, 2026.
HELSINKI CONTEMPORARY
Bulevardi 10, 00120 Helsinki
