Treats from Finland by
ceramist Heini Riitahuhta & painter Kristiina Uusitalo
2.12.2017-13.2.2018
Vernissage on Friday 1st December at 18:00 with live performance by Lara Virtanen

Hundreds of sheets of paper with silkscreen printed designs are piled
in a tray rack in the studio of Heini Riitahuhta (born in 1975). Her
original hand-drawn motifs can be found on her table. Heini veils her
ceramic pieces with Finnish florablended with the results of her
imagination. This ceramic artist is enchanted by seasonal variations.
Despite the Finnish summer being Heini's favourite season, in her
previous works she has been inspired by the melancholy winter. During
this period, her imagination has been filled with effervescent frost
flowers and their gauze-like, delicate structures.
In her art and design, Heini combines a range of decoration
techniques consisting of hand painting, silkscreen printing and
colouring with glazes. Layers of decorations create the feeling
that you
can dive into the decor. It fills you with the sense that it is in
beautiful harmony with the glazed surface. Ceramic hexagons, sometimes
ascending, sometimes imprints create a fascinating composition that
grows piece by piece, containing a tiny cosmos in each of numberless
fragments which, when taken together, form an expanding universe.

began her career as an artist at the turn of the
1970s and 1980s. It includes a large number of landscapes, both in
Finland and abroad. Her career spans several elements that have evolved
over the years towards clarified expression, the precision of light and
colour and the ability to become enraptured. She dares to let colours
shine and she is a colourist to the greatest degree, even when
approaching different shades of grey or the world of black and white. Kristiina Uusitalo's
approach, addressing the phenomena of the figurative and the abstract,
time and place, momentariness and space, has deepened year by year.
The watercolours by Kristiina Uusitalo that are on display are forceful
works of art. Although the sensitivity characteristic of watercolour
work is present, the main aspect of these paintings is making the
immaterial material. They form a visually parallel series to Uusitalo's
oil paintings. It is as if they condense through their size and
technique what was previously under a magnifying glass in her large oil
paintings. The landscape is now more whole, as it were, though still
remaining hidden. These paintings also reveal in an interesting manner
the similarities of watercolour and oil painting. When painting in oils
on metal or with watercolour on paper, each act is bare. Kristiina
Uusitalo's skilled brushwork is one of the cornerstones of her art.


