Hanhela, Anssi Kaarlo Matias | Artist Register – Artists’ Association of Finland

Bio

I was born in 1962. After many years of studying and working all over Finland, I returned to my roots in Haukipudas,Northern Ostrobothnia.
I started my career in the 1980s painting expressive landscapes.

After having painted constructivist images of gods and minimalist hidden images that dealt with sexuality, I circled back to expressionism when I started painting colorful, expressive art that consists of stories and scenes of life.

The works deal with, among others, problems of loneliness and social oppression. Love is another important theme. A man’s life is a struggle between reality and his own sensitive emotions. It is an existential distress about which of the traces drawn in my memory are real, and which are colored by strong emotions and daydreaming born out of loneliness.

Everything is nevertheless just as real, the world around me takes strongly shape through one’s self.

In most paintings, the viewer can find myself, a dark-haired man with a mustache, sometimes even wearing a stern expression on his face. Humor is a part of the internal world portrayed by the works. Erotic themes and the striped shirt era are retreating. The latter of which especially reflects changes in the artist’s personal life. Ghosts, spirits and breaths are new features in his work. They mirror my own thoughts and those around me, they also portray meetings and fantasies in another dimension.

In my works ghosts represent goodness and give a person strength. Ghosts appear sometimes from my own head and sometimes as if from another dimension. Ghosts are thoughts whose goodness or wickedness depends on the day and the circumstances. Societal uncertainty gives birth to evil spirits. The world today is possessed by egotism, conceit and excessive individualism. That’s why we need ghosts.

Ghosts are copies of humans, but they are hidden in my works. I saw my own ghost once. The thought of supernatural beings comes from the artist’s interest in Finnish mythology, and it creates a rich imaginary internal world in his life.

Translation Maria Skyttä