Rauha Mäkilä: Momo 21.4.-17.9.2023
Press release 5.4.2023
Rauha Mäkilä: Momo
21.4.-17.9.2023
Ars Nova, 2nd floor.
Helsinki-based artist Rauha Mäkilä (b. 1980) explores her own life through art. Paintings are candid yet magical snapshots of everyday life, family, and the artist’s close circle of friends. They convey an intimate feeling between the artist and her themes – a lived life and its many flavours, conflicting emotions, and intertwining phases. Most of Mäkilä’s paintings depict people: the close-up portraits and milieu portraits record fleeting glimpses of transitory moments.
Mäkilä says: “Our daily life and reality often help us mirror our emotions and how we perceive the world. I’m still fascinated by the charm and honesty of the obviousness of everyday life, and I don’t want to let go of those topics in the studio just yet.”
Recurring themes in Mäkilä’s paintings are the artist’s identity and the art world. She shows herself and women artists at work, creating images and sometimes self-portraits. Mäkilä’s self-portraits of herself painting in her studio, such as It Is What It Is (2020) and Nice Try (2020) find a parallel in an earlier portrait of a woman artist, 1930 (Tamara de Lempicka). The characters in the paintings are active subjects. The works are suffused by emancipatory power – images we still do not have enough of.
The subjects or situations in the works are like moments captured by a camera or memory, which are then lovingly and lingeringly painted in the studio. Contemporary music and popular culture are used as a background mood and a source of inspiration. Art, art museums and the art world are present as a spatial framework, an essential aspect of life.
Paintings, completed between 2020 and 2022, mostly depict some form of space. In addition to images featuring the artist’s studio, the façades of the art world have also made an appearance in the paintings: museums and galleries, such as in Suzu II (2022) or Venice (Anna) (2020).
Although a whole range of new types of spatial compositions have opened up in the paintings, Mäkilä’s main concern is still colour. In describing the progress of painting and her world of colour, she says: “My starting point is colour and how certain colours can support each other and build tension on the canvas. I test how I can build an interesting whole out of colours and what happens when I introduce new colours into my familiar and safe palette.”
In recent years, cats – our companions – have also received the significance they deserve by being the subject of a painting. In the most recent works featured in the exhibition, Momo (2023) and TarMo (2023), we are the objects of the cats’ scrutiny: they watch us constantly and surreptitiously.
Mäkilä’s palette is refreshingly bright and her compositions self-assured. Mäkilä mainly uses rich acrylic paints but occasionally also earthier oil colours. The colour surfaces in her paintings are a combination of boldly painted flat colour fields, thick contours that define spatial volumes, drips, and brushstrokes. The main subject of the canvases, usually a person, is painted more delicately, and the details contain more translucent textures.
The second-floor gallery at Ars Nova presents a broad selection of the artist’s oeuvre. Paintings on display are from 2013–2023. The exhibition is the artist’s first solo exhibition in the museum, offering for the first time an opportunity to get acquainted with Mäkilä’s paintings from different years and to see how she has changed as an artist.
Mäkilä graduated from the Finnish Academy of Fine Arts in 2007. Her most recent solo exhibitions were DEAR (2020), Ring a Ring o’ Roses (2018) and Harmony (2015) at Helsinki Contemporary. Mäkilä’s works have been exhibited in Finland and internationally at Munch Gallery (New York, USA), Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art (Kansas City, USA), EMMA – Espoo Museum of Modern Art, Galleri Thomassen (Gothenburg, Sweden) and Landskrona Museum (Landskrona, Sweden). She has work in the following collections: Kiasma – Finnish National Gallery Collection, HAM – City of Helsinki Art Collection, City of Gothenburg Art Collection, Saastamoinen Foundation Art Collection, Jenny and Antti Wihuri Foundation Art Collection, and Niemistö Collection. The exhibition is supported by the Finnish Cultural Foundation (Anni and S. Pajarinen Fund), the Arts Promotion Centre Finland, and the Finnish Heritage Agency.
More information:
Niina Tanskanen
curator
040 585 4499
niina.tanskanen@avan.fi
Rauha Mäkilä
rmakila@gmail.com