Rauha Mäkilä
Syksy 2025

05. - 28.09.2025

Rauha Mäkilä’s solo exhibition Syksy 2025 (Autumn 2025) presents new works united by a common theme: exploring memories through painting.

Mäkilä draws inspiration from visual notes and photographs, transforming fleeting snapshots of fast-paced moments into painterly form. Unfolding slowly and deliberately, her paintings emphasise process, materiality, colour and composition.

For Mäkilä, painting is an antidote to the perfection-driven flood of digital images. Like a book, a painting demands time: it can challenge us, and transport us to another place and time.

Colour is often her point of departure. As she paints, Mäkilä tests how colours interact to generate different moods and spaces. Too much harmony can be dull. Instead, rhythmic shifts, small imperfections, and even deliberately “wrong” colour choices create compositional vitality. Her works are always constructed in the language of painting: in the brushstrokes across the canvas, in the connections between shapes and colours, in the ways diverse elements support one another, and in what they ultimately convey.

Some of Mäkilä’s new works depict sculptures; others are “meta-paintings,” or paintings of paintings. These do not comment on the art world as such, but probe deeper questions of perception: how we see, what we value, and why. In the end, Mäkilä’s practice reminds us that what we encounter is not reality, but a constructed image—above all, a painting.

Link to online viewing room on Artsy