Kaija Mäenpää

Kaija Mäenpää
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Helsingin Taiteilijaseura / TaidelainaamoSuoraan taiteilijalta

Basic information

b. 1960, Helsinki
Visual Artist, Painter
Residence: Helsinki

Contact information

Artist’s Statement

The space in my paintings is both three-dimensional and pictorial. The viewer can open and close the ‘doors’ or ‘wings’ of the works, in which the spatiotemporal character is sedimented.

One consequence of the three-dimensionality is that the painting and the viewer share the same space with each other. Likewise, the size of the works, originating from the human body and spaces such as rooms, creates corporeal dimensions to the interaction between person and painting. The paintings overlap the borders of genre and question dichotomies. My painting combines corporeality and spirituality, subject and object, presence and memory, experience and thought.

Time takes on several meanings in these works, in addition to the temporal process of the viewer. For example, the movement of a person’s hand and face depicted as a sequence of shapes or shadows are presentations of time – as if there were mirrored situations on canvases, and those situations open up mental reflections. In the works there are also numbers, signifying clock time. These notations of time are painted with thick paint, and they give a context for the shift from objective time to subjective temporality.
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Current information

Solo exhibitions

Meditation on the Sublime, Huuto III / Galleria Huuto, Helsinki, 28.9.–22.10.2023

Sedimented Time, Galleria Kulma / Porvoo Art Hall, 3.–26.9.2021

Sedimented Time, Galleria Valo, Arktikum House, Rovaniemi, 1.11.–9.12.2018

Sedimented Time, Galleria Duetto, Helsinki, 4.–28.1.2018

 

The social artwork

Postcard Album (2011–)
3.1.–30.1.2019
Hyllygalleria, Rikhardinkatu Library, Helsinki

Bio

Visual artist Kaija Mäenpää (b. 1960, Helsinki) lives and works in Helsinki. She graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in 1989 and earned a Master of Fine Arts degree in 1998. She also has a Master of Arts degree from the University of Helsinki. Since 1988, Mäenpää has taken part in joint exhibitions at, for example, Helsinki Art Hall and Charlottenborg in Copenhagen and held solo exhibitions at, among others, Galleria Duetto and Galleria G in Helsinki and Stora Galleriet / Konstnärshuset in Stockholm. Her works are included in various art collections, such as the collections of HAM Helsinki Art Museum, Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art, EMMA Espoo Museum of Modern Art, and The Jenny and Antti Wihuri Foundation.


Mäenpää's paintings resemble cupboards with doors, books with pages or a kind of room with walls. These large-scale paintings that combine pictorial space and object space narrow the gap between the work and the experiencer as well as between the painting and the places of life. The "doors" of the works form transition spaces where Mäenpää deals with the processes of existence simultaneously with the meanings created through the structure of the painting itself. In recent exhibitions, she has equated photographs with paintings, while in her early works, the self-portrait photographs are built into the surfaces of the paintings.

For Kaija Mäenpää, a painting is not an object but a kind of subject that, through its structure and interaction with the experiencer, seems to think about the questions of philosophy as visual lived thinking. For example, the recent exhibitions / series of works Thought without Name/Nimetön ajatus, Sedimented Time and Meditation on the Sublime meditate in different ways on the fracture of linear time and conceptual thinking.