Inside Out Exhibition @ Helsinki Contemporary - With Artists Kati Immonen, Michael Johansson, Teemu Mäenpää, Rauha Mäkilä

Inside Out

Kati Immonen, Michael Johansson, Teemu Mäenpää, Rauha Mäkilä

Helsinki Contemporary

December 1 - 22, 2023

RAUHA MÄKILÄ

Onnenkissa, 2023

Oil on canvas, 100 x 80 cm

Photo: Jussi Tiainen

TEEMU MÄENPÄÄ

Kindness, 2023

Acrylic and oil on canvas, 120 x 93 cm

Photo: Jussi Tiainen

MICHAEL JOHANSSON

Mirrorcube - Turquoise, 2023

Mixed media, 24 x 24 x 24 cm

Photo: Michael Johansson

KATI IMMONEN

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).”

KATI IMMONEN
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.

MICHAEL JOHANSSON

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.

TEEMU MÄENPÄÄ

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.

RAUHA MÄKILÄ

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

helsinkicontemporary.com

Kati Immonen Exhibition, Helsinki Contemporary - Beside the Point

Kati Immonen: Beside the Point 

Helsinki Contemporary, Helsinki

February 7 - March 3, 2014

Beside the Point is about dealing with things, formulating them and re-shaping them in a way that is deliberately something other than the thing itself. It is simultaneously more and less, too little and, at the same time, much more than enough – of the point. The nitty-gritty, and well-meaning, but persistent questioning of it.

Beside the Point is an exhibition, its title. In Kati Immonen’s case Beside the Point is a gallery exhibition in which, using the means of painting and assimilating its possibilities, and creating within them, there is a focus on everyday phenomena, everyday moments, which go by, but sting us, bite us, as they pass.

Kati Immonen’s medium for painting is the aquarelle, i.e. the transparent watercolour. A choice, and the consequences of going deeper into and developing that choice are now present, on offer. The benefits and the quality of the paintings in Kati Immonen’s second exhibition at the gallery are outstandingly evident. It is superb, the way that Immonen is able to use and handle her chosen medium – colours, forms, in levels of narrative that are mutually articulated, in a movement from the figurative to the abstract, and back.

“Watercolour forces you to make some sort of plan or decision about the painting in advance – you don’t get the white paper back once you have gone and put your paws on it. This has been a relief to me, a kind of decisiveness and limitation of the possibilities, the fact that you can’t go on endlessly changing and wavering and putting off decisions about the direction of the painting.

“A sort of common denominator for my paintings could be using the properties of watercolour, its lightness, translucency, and the cultural baggage related to innocuousness, as part of the working process. In that sense, my working process has not really changed a great deal over the years, even if my subjects and focus of interest have varied. I suppose my working process has taken a roundabout route: sometimes, I feel like just painting and enjoying the colours with no more significant content than that, sometimes, I get inspired by working via some theme or other.”

Beside the Point is commonplace. It raises and lowers, makes special, those commonplace events, those countless moments whose value we rarely have time to acknowledge. Kati Immonen grabs hold of and takes pleasure in the successes and excesses of the everyday. What emerge are comments and utterances that demonstrate that the everyday is not just sublime, but also trivial, very trivial. Kati Immonen deals with something we all have, our quite incomprehensible ability to quibble and grumble, moan and complain – over nothing.

The lightness of the works, the nearness and simultaneous depth of their colour world take us into everyday scenes, in which they are exposed to the light somewhere between both a shared sense of shame and insightful detachment. There, between and by way of experiences that combine images of nature; for example, fish that are both human and alien, and works that come close, get under the skin, without our noticing it.

There follows an awakening, a moment of clarity. We are not laughing at anyone, we are laughing at ourselves, and we are laughing together.

Quotations from a conversation between Mika Hannula and Kati Immonen

The exhibition coincides with the publication of Kati Immonen’s book Talvisatu (Winter Tale).

HELSINKI CONTEMPORARY

Bulevardi 10, 00120 Helsinki

helsinkicontemporary.com