Teemu Mäenpää
On The Wall

11.08. - 10.09.2023

The gallery’s autumn season opens with visual artist Teemu Mäenpää’s (b. 1977) solo exhibition On The Wall. Mäenpää’s debut at Helsinki Contemporary consists of expressive, mixed-media paintings that are intricately detailed, rich in colour, and infused with dark humour. His roots are in street art, but he is also known for creating large-scale murals. The appeal of Mäenpää’s works lies above all in the impact of individual gestures. Over time, the painted surface reveals ever more subtle marks, concealed traces, and intentions.

Mäenpää’s creative process is intuitive, avoiding the formulaic. “I start by making gestures on the canvas, what kind depends quite a bit on my state of mind. Sometimes, the initial gestures can be so intriguing that they take me a long way. I observe the emergence of the gestures, seize coincidences, and begin seeing ideas and stories,” he says. Occasionally, he draws words on the canvas, like reminders, which guide the working process, eventually vanishing beneath layers of paint. Through the making of a painting, while working on it, a certainty arises about where and where not to act, how far to go, and when to stop.

Spray-painted lines, drips and pastel drawings create contrasts on the surface of his oil paintings. Mäenpää makes open-ended use of the means of street-art to combine the disparate techniques. “I use oil pastels for their simplicity and specifically for the “honest” marks that result from drawing. I’m happy to use anything that comes to hand, as long as it serves the work.” The unconstrained use of colour and the bold approach to painting stem from Mäenpää’s background as a graffiti artist. The spontaneity and ephemerality of graffiti are still there in his spacious compositions framed by light backgrounds.

The paintings in On The Wall exhibition contain allusions to physical reality, such as mask-like faces, brick walls and vegetation. However, Mäenpää's main motivator for expression is internal emotion. Through painting, he illustrates things he observes around him and that people can relate to. Headhunter is a variation of a theme that recurs in Mäenpää's body of work. The title refers to the brutality of working life, the worship of talent, and the transient nature of human relationships. The mood varies from playful to serious. “Which direction it leans towards, I want to leave it for the viewer to decide. I try to make paintings that can be experienced in multiple ways, depending on the viewer’s own life situation, and even their social class.”

For Mäenpää, painting is about seeking something new, but also about caring, for himself and for his own works. One of his smaller paintings, Elekieltä (eng. body language), is being shown in the exhibition. It contains two houseplants, one representing the artist himself. “It’s sometimes a relief to deal with a person through houseplants. Houseplants are almost always in front of a window, with the world outside it, and the home on the inside. I know my plants, I know when they need water, when they need fertilizer, when they need a shadier spot, and, well yes, sometimes they die in my hands.”

Teemu Mäenpää (b. 1977) is a visual artist from Tampere who graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts, Helsinki, in 2008. In his paintings, he combines masterful technique with expressive and strong emotional expression, as well as intensive use of colours. Mäenpää’s works have been shown in several exhibitions in Finland and abroad, including Gallery Halmetoja, Make Your Mark Gallery and ARTag Gallery. His works are in the collections of Tampere and Turku Art Museums, the Nelimarkka Foundation, Saastamoinen Foundation, and the Espoo Museum of Modern Art – EMMA, as well as in Seppo Fränti’s Collection at Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma. Mäenpää has also created several public commissioned artworks and was awarded the William Thuring Prize by the Finnish Art Society in 2018. Thank you to Arts Promotion Centre Finland (Taike) for supporting the artist’s work.