Featured Events in Helsinki in November, 2024 (May Updated)

Kristina Riska’s artistic process harnesses both the delicate malleability and the willful nature of clay. The artist describes herself as battling her material, attempting to achieve the impossible, which is why she was unsure until the last minute before the show’s opening how many of her sculptures would survive intact. When working with clay, one must humble oneself before the material – clay insists upon writing its own narrative. Its size and shape are transformed during firing in the kiln, as are the textures and colors imparted by glazes, thus conferring a key role to chance in the birthing process of ceramic art.

Raili Tang has been painting the seasons and incorporating organic references in her compositions for many years. Although figurative expression holds secondary relevance for the artist, her paintings convincingly capture a vivid sense of nature’s flux. Her latest paintings depict a variety of flowers – often of a fanciful, fictitious variety, but some are also inspired by real flower species. Floral motifs have a long legacy in art history. Artists have been conveying rich symbolism through flowers for centuries, but for Tang, the thing of paramount importance is the act of painting itself, whether done with a paintbrush, palette knife or even a glove. Tang is a physical painter whose process combines exuberant abandon and sensitive dialogue with the canvas. Sometimes her paintings are completed in one quick session, other times it takes longer for them to find their final form. Her overlapping layers of color interact in complex ways, supporting, challenging, surprising and drawing strength from each other, expressing the full spectrum of human emotions in their chorus of hues.

Kristo Saarikoski (b. 1992) graduated from the Free Art School in Helsinki in 2024. He has had several solo and group exhibitions in Finland. His work is held in the HUS Collection, the Pentti Sären Collection and the Finnish Artists' Association Collection. The artist lives and works in Helsinki.

A compositional scheme structured around an off-center circle is the uniting feature of the paintings in Hannu Väisänen’s latest exhibition. The artist describes his new works using the term tondo, which refers to a circular painting or relief. Tondi was popular, especially in high Renaissance painting, but Väisänen draws his inspiration from a very different source. Circular compositions have grown familiar to him through his many years of painting and decorating plates and bowls. He finds the round form inspiring, especially as plates are not intended to be viewed from any specific direction: they are always viewed in the round. In this new series of paintings, Väisänen rotated each piece several times during the painting process to decide which would be top and bottom. Although each tondo is sketched many times on paper before being transferred to canvas, Väisänen consciously avoids creating perfect circles drawn with a compass.