Heidi Lampenius @ Helsinki Contemporary - "Ground Color" Exhibition

Heidi Lampenius: Ground Color

Helsinki Contemporary

22 November - 21 December 2024

Heidi Lampenius

Stairs I, 2024

Photo: Jussi Tiainen

Clay paint on canvas, 200 cm x 130 cm

© Heidi Lampenius, courtesy Helsinki Contemporary

Heidi Lampenius

Stairs II, 2024

Photo: Jussi Tiainen

Clay paint on canvas, 200 cm x 130 cm

© Heidi Lampenius, courtesy Helsinki Contemporary

Heidi Lampenius

Stairs IV, 2024

Photo: Jussi Tiainen

Clay paint on canvas, 200 cm x 195 cm

© Heidi Lampenius, courtesy Helsinki Contemporary

Heidi Lampenius

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

helsinkicontemporary.com

Heidi Lampenius @ Helsinki Contemporary, Helsinki - Earthbound

Heidi Lampenius: Earthbound

Helsinki Contemporary, Helsinki

Through 21 November 2021

HEIDI LAMPENIUS' solo exhibition Earthbound at Helsinki Contemporary takes visitors back to nature, deep inside the Earth, and through strata of time and memory.

Heidi Lampenius works in series and her new set of works is a continuation of her previous solo exhibitions, with wavelength vibrations again present in the paintings. In painting in wavelengths she has found her own language and symbolism based on science – a way of conveying the experience of nature and our deep-seated relationship with it.

Heidi Lampenius’ works occupy the middle ground between figurative and abstract. The themes of memory and time dealt with in her previous production are taken deeper in the Earthbound exhibition. On this occasion, she delves into our archaic, collective memory and into deep time, which is felt as a slow movement in the Earth’s sediments and in the irregular surfaces of rocks.

By wiping and washing away, simplifying layer by layer, Heidi Lampenius passes through her own experience into a shared one, and on into the viewer’s private perceptions. In these works we feel rather than see places, natural phenomena and familiar sensations that cannot be put into words. In the On the Beach series, which depicts the meeting of land and sea, every viewer can find a familiar sensation of shore and water, everyone can identify with the experience of darkness in the works in the Black Rainbow series. The figures of owls are a theme running through the exhibition and serve, as it were, as message bearers across the interfaces that recur in the works – between the here and now and the beyond, between land and sea, between humankind and nature. “We inevitably bring our own memory images to a painting and construct a new memory image out of the work, a meaning for the present moment. In a painting we can utilize recognizability or attempt to obliterate it. For me this is an interesting property of painting,” Heidi Lampenius says.

HEIDI LAMPENIUS (b. 1977) graduated from the Finnish Academy of Fine Arts in 2011. She has subsequently participated in numerous group exhibitions in Finland and internationally, e.g. in Sweden, France, Italy, Singapore, Greece and Iceland. Heidi Lampenius’ works are represented in such public collections as Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma, EMMA Espoo Museum of Modern Art, Aine Art Museum, the Jenny and Antti Wihuri Foundation Collection and the Swedish Region Gävleborg’s public art collection.

HELSINKI CONTEMPORARY

Bulevardi 10, 00120 Helsinki

helsinkicontemporary.com

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