Anna Retulainen
Butterfly Garden

09.08. - 08.09.2024

For the past fifteen years, Anna Retulainen has been creating a garden that has emerged in a key role in her paintings. The garden is itself an artwork in this exhibition. Someone once described the experience of visiting her garden as “stepping into a painting”. Butterfly Garden explores whether a painting can offer the reverse experience: the feeling of entering a garden.

Retulainen’s garden and its plants exist mainly for the benefit of insects. Insect decline is a heartfelt concern for the artist, who deals with this theme both through painterly expression and contemplation of beauty.

Painting and gardening are intermingled practices for Retulainen. Her paintings are not depictions of plants but maps of next year’s garden. Her garden and her paintings are built in dialogue, the noticeable difference being that plants are harder to control than paints.

Retulainen’s paintings are layered like gardens. Last year’s fallen leaves protect the soil and feed new growth, with dinosaur kale and carrots mingling happily with myriad flowers. The various stages of the painting process – priming, overpainting, scraping, erasing – are analogous to planting, transplanting and weeding.

A garden is a miniature human-made world – a picture of nature. It is no coincidence that many artists keep gardens. Retulainen strives to interfere as little as possible with the natural cycle of the plants in her garden. Her relationship with her garden, its plants, trees and insects is a straightforward one: here, people are merely visitors.



Anna Retulainen (b. 1969) divides her time between Helsinki and Berlin. She has exhibited her work in Finland and internationally since the 1990s, and her paintings are found in all major Finnish art collections. Retulainen has been painting gardens for over fifteen years. Butterfly Garden is her seventh solo exhibition at Helsinki Contemporary.