Maiju Salmenkivi
Playground

06.02. - 01.03.2015

"We could imagine that for me the ground or base of the painting is quite concretely a kind of ‘playground’.”

The title of Maiju Salmenkivi’s exhibition refers both to her way of working and to the themes of her works. Playground is a series of paintings that, in Salmenkivi’s characteristic way, combine fantasy with everyday objects, phenomena and locations, along with topical news images.

“The subjects and my way of working vary. I am unable, nor do I want, to commit overmuch to a single way of doing and seeing things. The making has to keep that freshness. My approach to the subject and the painting process itself has something playful about it. I try to keep a certain lightness there, even if the subjects and the working process sometimes seem difficult and laborious.”


Salmenkivi’s paintings have a pictorial starting point that metamorphoses as the work progresses. Alongside the completed picture, equally important elements are painterliness, chance, and the artist’s constant openness. Another important thing is working on the grounds of the paintings in advance: tipping acrylic paint onto canvases creates a variety of puddles, from which the paintings start to take shape. The chance nature of the technique is an integral part of the painting process; it serves as an initial impetus and sets the tone for the future painting. In this way, Salmenkivi also avoids the risk of giving too much of an impression of illustrativeness.

In addition to everyday experiences and smaller-scale events, mass meetings and crowds are a recurrent subject in Salmenkivi’s works. The starting point for some of them has been celebrations or places in a city where people gather to celebrate. The subjects of the works in the Playground exhibition include the demonstrations in Ukraine and the Umbrella protests in Hong Kong. At the same time as they are a depiction of a grave crisis and of popular demonstrations, they are also reminiscent of a kind of folk festival. Of people’s need to be together.

“The Hong Kong demonstration pictures were gorgeous for a painter; different masses and shapes, water, umbrellas, riot police in close ranks in their visors, and the countermovement created by the demonstrators. And when these masses and shapes meet, it generates an energy and various kinds of subtle effects and interactions that I look for in paintings.”
- Maiju Salmenkivi

Maiju Salmenkivi (b. 1972, Helsinki) graduated with an MFA from the Finnish Academy of Fine Arts in 2003. She has shown widely in solo and collective exhibitions in Finland and elsewhere in Europe, for instance, in Pimeän päivä, Kluuvi Gallery, 2009; AARGH! – 10 years later. Galleria Huuto 10th anniversary exhibition, Galleria Huuto, 2012; and It's a set-up, Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma, 2010. Salmenkivi’s works have been shown at Helsinki Contemporary in the solo exhibition Splash in 2012 and in the collective exhibition Street Life in 2013. Her works are represented in Finland’s leading collections, including those of EMMA – Espoo Museum of Modern Art, Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma, and the Jenny and Antti Wihuri Foundation Art Collection.