Leena Nio - Exhibition @ Helsinki Contemporary - "Dwellers"

Leena Nio: Dwellers

Helsinki Contemporary

10 January - 2 February 2025

Leena Nio

Crowded I, 2024

Photo: Jussi Tiainen

Oil on canvas, 170 cm x 150 cm

© Leena Nio, courtesy Helsinki Contemporary

Leena Nio

Composition with a red dress shirt and yellow 

handmade sweater, 2023-2024

Photo: Jussi Tiainen

Oil on canvas, 170 cm x 150 cm

© Leena Nio, courtesy Helsinki Contemporary

Leena Nio’s practice is underpinned by the pleasure of painting and looking. As she paints, she surrenders herself to the magic of colour and an abundance of details and intertwined brushstrokes. She plays with tensions between concealment and exposure, the personal and the universal, and juxtapositions of contrasting textures.

Leena Nio’s latest exhibition consists of still life compositions capturing scenes of quotidian daily existence. Many are composed around a laundry basket, a mundane household item that is rarely celebrated in art, yet nevertheless an object in which there is beauty, softness and nuances to be discovered. A human presence is suggested indirectly through cropped fragments of garments and laundry.

Leena Nio’s complexly layered paintings straddle between abstraction and representation. Things hidden behind façades are central to her recent paintings, many of which literally contain peepholes evoking the duality of daily existence: behind the public façade is a private world that is revealed only to one’s closest loved ones. Fluffy jumpers and other items of clothing appear as recurring symbols of the softening buffers that we erect between ourselves and external reality.

Leena Nio’s layered paintings bring to light the interconnected nature of reality. As if braiding hair or knitting strands of woollen yarn, she visually juxtaposes and interweaves meticulously executed details, inviting viewers to reflect on the inextricable oneness of the objects, people, and other living beings in our lives.

Leena Nio’s paintings seem to ponder the way our lives unfold almost like a series of still life compositions. An object such as a laundry basket is a theatre stage upon which we perform our daily existence in an ever-changing procession of clothing, while we ourselves observe this theatre of life as onlookers in the sidelines.

HELSINKI CONTEMPORARY

Bulevardi 10, 00120 Helsinki

helsinkicontemporary.com

Leena Nio @ Galerie Forsblom, Helsinki - Improved Paintings

Leena Nio: Improved Paintings

Galerie Forsblom, Helsinki

Through February 28, 2021

LEENA NIO’s (b. 1982) new paintings are all about layers –– both physically and symbolically. Layering has always been Leena Nio’s signature technique, but this time the concept is taken to the next level. Nio experiments with a new technical idiosyncrasy in each of her exhibitions, with each painting taking its cue from a minor, commonplace occurrence. The mundanity leaves plenty of room for both the painting process and the viewer’s interpretations to unfold freely.

Like many peers of her generation, Leena Nio collected stickers and Victorian die-cuts in her childhood. These “stickers” have now found their way into her paintings. The glossy, lacquered pictorial elements hovering on the surface of the canvas are – despite being hand-painted – deceptively reminiscent of stickers or die-cuts. They are like emojis added to a text message. Or Instagram posts with added stickers and filters. The paintings in the exhibition achieve the same effect: using 21st-century tools, they take the message to the next level. With her add-on flourishes, Nio also self-reflexively comments on her process. Often finding it difficult to know when to finish a painting, she adds the final sticker as if dotting an “i” or crossing a “t.”

The surplus layers add many possible interpretations to her paintings. Her paintings are timeless, yet the add-ons link them powerfully to the contemporary moment. Her work abounds in allusions to art history, starting with her conscious decision to leave exposed patches of the raw, unpainted linen canvas, a device often used in classical painting. The irresistible union of historical allusions and stickers creates a clever conceptual and visual interplay of ideas.

After earning a master’s degree in visual arts from the Finnish Academy of Fine Arts, LEENA NIO was awarded the Finnish Art Society’s Ducat Prize in 2010. In 2021 she will complete a large-scale public artwork for Finnoo station on Helsinki’s new Länsimetro subway line. Also coming up this year is a multidisciplinary piece for the Espoo Museum of Modern Art EMMA to be completed together with her husband, Kalle Nio. Nio’s work is found in significant Finnish collections, including the Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma, the Saastamoinen Foundation Collection, and the Sara Hildén Art Museum.

GALERIE FORSBLOM

Yrjönkatu 22, 00120 Helsinki

www.galerieforsblom.com

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Leena Nio @ Galerie Forsblom, Helsinki - Mood Constructions

Leena Nio: Mood Constructions
Galerie Forsblom, Helsinki
January 11 – February 10, 2019

Leena Nio (b. 1982) leads the viewer into an imaginary world of childhood flashbacks in her latest paintings.  Her dream-like oils feature recurring motifs such as wooden huts, abandoned houses, and barren landscapes, all woven together in a self-contained dream universe. Dredged from the depths of the artist’s subconscious, these insistently resurfacing motifs create a mood of haunting tension. Among the artist’s sources of inspiration is Stand By Me (1986), a coming-of-age film based on a novella by Stephen King. The movie recounts the adventures of a group of 12-year-old boys who are forced into a painful confrontation with adulthood.

Despite their melancholy atmosphere, Leena Nio’s paintings convey the idea that playfulness is inherent to her work method. Nio builds real-life studio versions of many objects portrayed in her paintings, such the small wooden cubby houses and wings of wooden planks. Building and hand-crafting is a connecting theme linking all the works in this new exhibition. Nio’s paintings pay homage to the imagination, celebrating the richness of our inner world. The wooden cubby house is like a metaphor for creativity – a place of refuge for constructing a parallel reality.

Leena Nio’s creative process has distinct phases; each series of works highlights a new technique that she gradually develops before putting into play. Her previous exhibition featured wispy, weightless watercolors that blend fluidly with the ”taping” technique of her new paintings. She came up with the idea of the plank-like patterns by drizzling paint onto a vertically taped canvas. She allows the paint to run freely on the striped surface, creating a lively effect that seems a logical continuation of her semi-abstract, plump clouds and rhythmically undulating grasslands.

Earning her Master’s in Visual Arts from the Finnish Academy of Fine Arts in 2010, Leena Nio was awarded the prestigious Ducat Prize by the Finnish Art Society the same year. In 2014, she was named an Ars Fennica candidate. Her work is represented in a number of Finland’s leading public art collections, such as the Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma, the Saastamoinen Foundation and the Sara Hildén Art Museum.

Galerie Forsblom
Lönnrotinkatu 5 / Yrjönkatu 22, 00120 Helsinki
www.galerieforsblom.com