Hannaleena Heiska
Celestial Question Mark
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Hannaleena Heiska’s new solo exhibition Celestial Question Mark presents the versatile artist’s new, radiantly hued paintings. Her colours derive their intensity both from their juxtapositions and from her way of using the whiteness of the chalk ground as a source of light, producing a kind of inner glow in the painting. Recurring universal shapes such as arcs, twists, and swirls run through her work, combined with colours that glow like bright stars.
Observatories formed a motif in Heiska’s earlier charcoal drawings. Working serially, she has also employed cinematic sci-fi imagery in her paintings to invoke reflections on human existence. Her latest exhibition directs our gaze again towards the cosmos, while at the same time plumbing the depths of the human mind and consciousness – places that are in many respects unknown frontiers just like distant celestial bodies.
The exhibition takes its name from a photo of a giant cosmic question mark captured by the James Webb telescope in 2023, which scientists believe to be a distant galaxy. In this exhibition, astronomy is one source of inspiration for Heiska, as are the photographs of electrical energy generated by the 19th century French astronomer Étienne Léopold Trouvelot.
One of Heiska’s new series of paintings is named after the classic theosophical treatise Thought-Forms (1901) by Annie Besant and Charles Webster Leadbeater, a book that has inspired many generations of artists in theorizing that ideas and emotions have shapes and colours. The paintings in Heiska’s Thought Forms series are more abstract than her other, previous work, enabling her to express ideas and feelings intuitively, freed of the constraints of the physical world. The paintings also invite the viewer to engage in a moment of introspection.
Today we have a vast amount of information readily available at our fingertips. In her essay Ognosia, the Polish Nobel laureate Olga Tokarczuk contemplates how this has, in fact, made our world smaller and more limited. Heiska for her part strives to visualize existence by painting the invisible phenomena that shape our daily reality, seeking the deeper connections and meanings between them.
The exhibition has been kindly supported by Arts Promotion Centre Finland.
Observatories formed a motif in Heiska’s earlier charcoal drawings. Working serially, she has also employed cinematic sci-fi imagery in her paintings to invoke reflections on human existence. Her latest exhibition directs our gaze again towards the cosmos, while at the same time plumbing the depths of the human mind and consciousness – places that are in many respects unknown frontiers just like distant celestial bodies.
The exhibition takes its name from a photo of a giant cosmic question mark captured by the James Webb telescope in 2023, which scientists believe to be a distant galaxy. In this exhibition, astronomy is one source of inspiration for Heiska, as are the photographs of electrical energy generated by the 19th century French astronomer Étienne Léopold Trouvelot.
One of Heiska’s new series of paintings is named after the classic theosophical treatise Thought-Forms (1901) by Annie Besant and Charles Webster Leadbeater, a book that has inspired many generations of artists in theorizing that ideas and emotions have shapes and colours. The paintings in Heiska’s Thought Forms series are more abstract than her other, previous work, enabling her to express ideas and feelings intuitively, freed of the constraints of the physical world. The paintings also invite the viewer to engage in a moment of introspection.
Today we have a vast amount of information readily available at our fingertips. In her essay Ognosia, the Polish Nobel laureate Olga Tokarczuk contemplates how this has, in fact, made our world smaller and more limited. Heiska for her part strives to visualize existence by painting the invisible phenomena that shape our daily reality, seeking the deeper connections and meanings between them.
The exhibition has been kindly supported by Arts Promotion Centre Finland.
Hannaleena Heiska
Trouvelot Figure I, 2023
oil on board
73 cm x 70 cm
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Trouvelot Figure I, 2023
oil on board
73 cm x 70 cm
Exhibition view: Celestial Question Mark
Photo by Jussi Tiainen
Exhibition view: Celestial Question Mark
Photo by Jussi Tiainen
Exhibition view: Celestial Question Mark
Photo by Jussi Tiainen
Exhibition view: Celestial Question Mark
Photo by Jussi Tiainen