This exhibition takes a retrospective look at the career of Maaria Wirkkala (b. 1954). Spanning four decades, it presents variations of her early works alongside new pieces created for this exhibition.
Maaria Wirkkala is in many respects a pioneer in her aesthetic idiom, her treatment of materials, and her conceptual approach. She weaves together sculpture, installation, video and performativity. Space, light, and time are key themes in her practice. Glass ladders, rocks, postcards, chairs, houses and butterflies are among the recurring elements of her signature vocabulary, the meaning of which keeps changing in new contexts.
Maaria Wirkkala creates art around spaces. Her art is rich in dualities such as past/present, presence/absence, light/darkness, transition/permanence, remembering/forgetting, hiding/showing.
Maaria Wirkkala describes herself as creating “moments and places”. Her philosophy is to accept the situation in which she happens to be working, using as her thematic material the situational context, her personal state of mind, and the ethos of our time. All career long she has been exploring the themes of otherness, outsiderness and the impossibility of genuine communication. ”You can only try to understand the other”, the artist says.
Maaria Wirkkala was invited to exhibit at the Venice Biennale in 1995, 2001 and in 2007, when she was given the use of the entire Aalto Pavilion. It was there that she first presented Landing Prohibited, an iconic Finnish classic currently on display at the Arter Contemporary Art Museum in Istanbul. Wirkkala has presented her work widely in Japan, both at the Echigo-Tsumari Art Triennial since 2003 and at the Northern Alps Art Festival in 2017 and 2021. Her installation Not So Innocent premiered at the first Helsinki Biennial in 2021.
Maaria Wirkkala ranks among the most acclaimed artists of her generation. She was the first artist to receive the prestigious pan-Nordic Ars Fennica Prize in 1991. In 2008 she was awarded the Pro Finlandia medal.
In the picture: Maaria Wirkkala, What has happened – What will happen. Northern Alps Art Festival 2020-2021 (Nagano, Japan). Photo: Tsuyoshi Hongo