Emma Ainala
Season of the Witch

06. - 29.08.2021

Helsinki Contemporary is delighted to open its autumn season with Emma Ainala’s solo exhibition Season of the Witch. As a whole, the new exhibition addresses themes that Ainala has dealt with before, and takes them ever deeper. Deeper into the forest, into the world of fairy tales, and into places that few can reach.

Ainala is known for her prolific, detailed works that explore mythologies and a variety of spaces, both physical and digital – some even imagined. The inner worlds of these new works are governed by their own rules. Mingled together in them can be the everyday, the sublime, and multiple other levels, unquestioned, as in a dream. The oppressive-looking interiors of the new body of works could be compared to untamed outdoor spaces, to the realms of witches and vampires. In both the walls that close in on us and the verdant exteriors we can make out figures from the realms of fairy tale, like forces of rescue or consolation, stories in which we can immerse ourselves or escape.

Problematization of the gaze, awareness of its highly charged nature, and of the internalized gaze, is a recurrent theme in Ainala’s works. The characters in them avert their gaze, indifferent. The figures in these paintings seem to be trying to escape our gaze, into an interior world of their own. Perhaps within them they discover an elemental force, the vampire and the witch – the fairy-tale figure whose wings carry it away.

The colour world of the paintings also shifts from the pastel-shaded mist of the interiors and previous exhibitions to green and brown, earthy, elemental colours, and to their opposite, to bright, primary colours. The rhythm of the exhibition arises in the interplay between the large, detailed paintings and the small ones. For Ainala a painting is a tool of self-expression and a source of delight, which is evident in the unrestrained quality of both the medium and the subject matter.

Ainala’s works make no attempt to direct the way we look, rather, they remain open to the recipient’s own feelings and interpretations. “The remoteness and enigmaticness of the figures remind us of our own inner viewers, who want to know what the figures want, represent or manifest. The utopian edge to the works is, in fact, bound up with the insight that in fact nothing is strange or obscure. There are only meanings in which, for one reason or another, I either want to participate or not. Those reasons are then either more or less noble and base, profound and obvious, interesting and banal,” writes Petteri Enroth in the catalogue accompanying the exhibition.

The atmospheres of Season of the Witch take us into a level of the unconscious, into worlds before words. Tendrils of powerful symbolism are sent out by each of the large-format paintings. It is up to the viewer to decide what those symbols mean.

A catalogue of Emma Ainala’s artistic works is being published to accompany the exhibition, with the support of the Saastamoinen Foundation.

Emma Ainala (b. 1989, Helsinki) graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts, Helsinki, in 2013 and has been actively exhibiting ever since. Her first solo museum exhibition was at Mikkeli Art Museum in 2017, followed by an extensive solo showing at Jyväskylä Art Museum in 2019. In 2020, she had a solo exhibition at Hyvinkää Art Museum. In spring 2018, Ainala was invited to participate in the tradition-steeped Spring Exhibition at Kunsthal Charlotteborg in Copenhagen. Her works are represented in the Saastamoinen Foundation Art Collection, Niemistö Collection, Mikkeli Art Museum’s collections, and others.