"Beauty has been central to me in making a picture. I build the image in the direction, consciously or unconsciously, which is the prevailing (western) concept of beauty. The charm and seductiveness are so striking that a person stops to look. Beauty plays an important role in all of this. There must be a manifestation of beauty in the picture."
Heikki Marila (b. 1966), one of the most famous names in Finnish contemporary art, is a Collection Artist of the Sara Hildén Foundation. In 2011 he won the largest painting prize in the Nordic countries, the Carnegie Art Award. Marila is best known for his large-scale oil paintings and intense subjects, such as biblical themes, self-portraits and flower arrangements. The retrospective at the Sara Hildén Art Museum will feature Marila’s iconic ensembles, as well as works that have never before been exhibited.
Marila’s paintings play with contrasts, combining the spiritual, beautiful and sublime with the carnal, corporeal and repulsive. His paintings have a strong physical materiality, emphasised by the dialogue between figural and non-figural elements and thick layers of oil paint.
