Maiju Salmenkivi
Overlook

02. - 25.10.2020

Maiju Salmenkivi’s solo exhibition Overlook is an exploration of memories, remembering, and the passage of time. The title refers to a lookout point, to disregarding something, and to looking down on something from above, but also to the hotel in Stanley Kubrick’s film The Shining.

Salmenkivi began working on the exhibition after seeing her cousin’s photographs of her grandfather’s hotel in Vaasa. The ruined hotel was the landscape of Salmenkivi’s childhood holidays – in the 70s and 80s, the family did not go abroad, but took the train to Vaasa and the hotel. It had a bath and a free soft-drinks machine. She returned to the neglected hotel, which had stood empty for ten years and was in a bad state. Snow had fallen in the corridors from broken skylights, hotel papers were scattered about the place, and campfires had evidently been lit indoors. Her mind filled with memories of childhood, contrasting sharply with the current situation, while she also noticed she was thinking about Kubrick’s The Shining from 1980, which she saw for the first time as an 11-year-old, peeping out from behind a sofa.

Films served as reference points in two of Salmenkivi’s exhibitions of the start of the 2000s. This time, the atmosphere of her own family’s hotel and of the Overlook Hotel exerted a psychological pull. What journey in painting could she take through these images and atmospheres?

The exhibition paintings show remnants of both her grandfather’s hotel in Vaasa and the room in The Shining, where the main character is faced with something unexpected. The themes of having a bath, swimming pools, rooms, corridors and garden vistas become intertwined, as memory images shift from fiction to fact, from allusive to concrete, and from imagined to experienced. The film’s mysterious room with its arched door frame forms a strange new space, a place to do and try things out freely. Not even the artist can explain everything: “Paintings always end up having quite a lot of stream of consciousness, and unprocessed issues from somewhere come face to face with life. From the past, from the moment, from future hopes and concerns.” 

The paintings, made with oil, acrylic and spray paint in Salmenkivi’s characteristic fashion, are intensely colourful, and have a spatial quality, and especially motion. The tones in these paintings made on coloured grounds use more broken colours than before and, alongside the works on canvas, there are also paintings on paper and small collages. In the collage-like paintings in the Aarre (Treasure) series the different levels emerge through gaps, prompting thoughts of the stage-set-likeness also seen in other works, which evokes cinematic references. The exhibition hanging alternates large and small works, like memories that change in shape and intensity.

Maiju Salmenkivi's (b. 1972) works were last seen at Helsinki Contemporary in the Happy Garden solo exhibition in 2017. Her works have been seen in Finland and abroad, in both solo and group exhibitions, most recently in the group exhibitions The Only Way is Up at Kunsthall Stavanger, Norway (2016), and Sensual Knowledge at the Landskrona Museum, Sweden (2017). Her works are in the collections of Saastamoinen Foundation, Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma, Amos Rex, Turku Art Museum, the Jenny and Antti Wihuri Foundation, and elsewhere.