Exhibition texts – From the Beginning
You can read the gallery texts and audio transcripts on your own device. You may also listen the texts with a screen reader.
The texts start on the upper floor of the museum.
Introduction
“Don’t call me a patron, call me a friend of the arts. For that’s what I am, and have been my entire adult life…” Sara Hildén
From the Beginning introduces Finnish art from the Sara Hildén Foundation Collection. The exhibition features a selection of modernist classics, geometrical and expressionist abstract art, neo-realism, and samples of diverse art movements from the late 1990s to the present day.
The Sara Hildén Foundation Collection owes its existence to the Tampere-based fashion entrepreneur Sara Hildén (1905–1993) and her passion for art. Hildén invested her business fortune into amassing an extensive collection of contemporary art, which remains dynamic and continues to be enriched with ongoing additions to this day.
Since 1979, the collection has been permanently housed at the Sara Hildén Art Museum, one of the few art museums in the world to be built around a collection assembled by a woman and to carry her name.
Early modernists
Sara Hildén began collecting art in the late 1940s, initially focusing on paintings by her then-husband Erik Enroth. She later expanded her scope to other Finnish artists and international names. Hildén kept abreast of new developments on the contemporary art scene and frequently visited exhibitions and artists’ studios. She forged personal ties with many artists, some of whom became her close friends.
The earliest, modernist part of the collection reflects the emergence of diverse new voices in Finnish art.
Tyko Sallinen, The Fanatics, 1918
Tyko Sallinen was a leading figure in the November Group, a collective of expressionist painters who set out to revolutionise Finnish art in the early 20th century. Their work was characterised by its earthy palette, dramatic brushwork, and unflinchingly raw subject matter, often foregrounding deeply national themes. Sallinen combined the emotive brushwork of Expressionism with Cubist fragmentation of form.
The Fanatics is one of Tyko Sallinen’s most famous paintings. Multiple versions and sketches exist of this painting, which depicts a pious religious gathering. It was inspired by the artist’s powerful experience during divine service in Nauvo Church in the spring of 1918, which reminded him of his childhood growing up in a deeply religious Laestadian family. The picture plane is divided into two sections, with the spiritual world above, the secular below.
Helene Schjerfbeck, Costume Picture, 1938
Helene Schjerfbeck began her career as a French-inspired Realist and pleinairist. Her style grew progressively more reductive as she embraced portraiture and the still life genre.
Costume Picture dates from Schjerfbeck’s mature period, offering a good example of her stripped-down modernist style. It is a reinterpretation of a portrait she originally painted in 1909 while residing in Hyvinkää. The model was the local baker’s daughter, Taimi Lilja.
Schjerfbeck loved both art and fashion, as did Sara Hildén. The model’s costume often played an integral role in Schjerfbeck’s portraits. Her painting career spanned from the 1870s to the 1940s, coinciding with the genesis and early history of modern fashion.
Erik Enroth, The Politicians, 1947
Erik Enroth ranked among the preeminent Finnish artists of the post-war generation. The Politicians is a key work of his early career. It premiered at his first solo exhibition in Helsinki in 1948. The piece was painted shortly after the end of the Second World War, depicting politicians at a game of cards. The apple on the table symbolises power, while the pyramid alludes to eternity.
In 1945, Enroth settled in Tampere, where he painted impressions of the townscape, factories and mill workers. He married Sara Hildén in 1949. Hildén admired Enroth’s art and supported him as his patron until their marriage ended in 1963. She acquired a large number of his paintings, which today form the core of the Sara Hildén Foundation Collection.
Kauko Lehtinen, Spring, 1966
Kauko Lehtinen was a leading exponent of Finnish modernism. His visually exuberant paintings are rich in detail and marked by their sensitive and vivid command of line.
In the 1950s, Lehtinen joined the Group 9 collective founded in Turku by the surrealist painter Otto Mäkilä. Lehtinen’s friendship with Mäkilä had a major formative impact on his artistic style, as did his discovery of international influences such as Pablo Picasso, Informalist Art and Neo-Realism.
Lehtinen is often described as a “nonconforming surrealist”, since his work departed from the fundamental principles of Surrealism. The content of his paintings was always based on visible reality and everyday human experience.
Lehtinen was a long-standing artist member of the Sara Hildén Foundation and a personal friend of Sara Hildén’s.
Geometric abstraction
Abstract art took root in Finnish art in the mid-20th century. Geometrical art delved into the study of pure form, surface, line, and colour. Artworks no longer referred to anything outside themselves – they were now purely “art for art’s sake”.
Göran Augustson, Blue Composition
Göran Augustson was a painter who embraced pure colour and geometrical abstraction. His most influential sources of inspiration were Victor Vasarely and his teacher at the Turku Art Academy, Sam Vanni. Augustson shares certain stylistic affinities with Op Art and American Hard-Edge Painting.
Augustson strove for purity both in his treatment of colour and form. His paintings combine hard-edged geometry with elegantly arched lines and playful distortions of perspective. The titles of his paintings allude to their sources of inspiration in nature and music.
Carolus Enckell, Picture Light I-III, 1975–80
Carolus Enckell dedicated his career to the study of colour and to carrying on the legacy of modernism.
Enckell was intrigued by colour theories foregrounding the inner experience of colour and light. He had a special relationship with the colour red, which he associated with early memories of Russian icons. The artist once said: “Of all the colours, red is the most versatile, the most soulful, and the most extraordinarily vivid.”
Stripes are a recurring hallmark in Enckell’s compositions. The signature vertical stripes appearing in his early paintings later expanded into wider colour fields. In their reductive simplicity, the horizontal red bands in this series of paintings are reminiscent of Mark Rothko, who was one of Enckell’s most influential artistic role models.
Realist tendencies
New international realist movements such as pop art and photorealism rose to prominence in Finnish art in the 1960s and 1970s. Global political turmoil was poignantly echoed in the content of contemporary art, with many works asserting a vocal stance on topical social, political and environmental issues.
Jarmo Mäkilä, Masks of Our Time (Punks), 1979 (1982)
Jarmo Mäkilä became interested in punk subculture after visiting London in 1978. Inspired by the trip, he painted a series of portraits of punk rockers that stylistically evoke Pop aesthetics and the work of Andy Warhol.
The portraits are based on photographs published in Virginia Boston’s cult book Punk Rock. Although borrowing is a recognised Pop Art strategy, Mäkilä’s citation of existing images sparked a plagiarism scandal back in the day. The paintings also generated positive interest. They were exhibited in art galleries and at alternative culture venues such as the Lepakko club in Helsinki and at the Pori Jazz Festival.
Kimmo Kaivanto, When the Sea Dies II, 1973
Kimmo Kaivanto was a painter, printmaker and sculptor noted as one of the leading Finnish artists of his generation. Sara Hildén followed his career closely and assembled an extensive collection of his works, including key masterpieces spanning the breadth of his career.
Kaivanto is known especially for his work addressing social and environmental themes. From the 1960s onwards, the artist spent his summers painting on Arkkusaari Island in Lake Näsijärvi.
Kaivanto painted two versions of When the Sea Dies, which expresses the artist’s love of nature and his concern about the problem of eutrophication. The painting is one of the first Finnish artworks to voice an outspoken environmentalist commentary.
Informalism
The late 1960s witnessed the advent of Informalism, the European counterpart to American Abstract Expressionism. Informalism had a revolutionary impact on Finnish modernism, which embraced free form, bold expression, and experimentation with novel materials. Finnish Informalism was characterised by its nature-inspired content and earthy colour palette.
Ahti Lavonen, Spring Structure, 1964
Ahti Lavonen was an influential Finnish modernist. He devoted his early career to painting dark-hued landscapes and still life compositions. In the early 1960s, he stripped down his palette radically, adopting an almost monochrome colour scheme. This painting represents his ‘white period’.
Lavonen celebrates the inherent materiality of his paintings, foregrounding the material itself and its textured surface. He experimented with various materials, mixing pigment with unlikely elements such as pieces of fabric, sand or glue.
Kain Tapper, Alder Skull, 1977
Kain Tapper is one of Finland’s most famous sculptors. He is known for conveying a distinctly Finnish feel for nature through a modern idiom of expression.
Tapper expanded his repertoire from bronze and stone to wood in the 1960s. His sculptures were often inspired by landscape formations, nuances of light, impressions of changing weather and times of day, and his inner experiences of nature.
Tapper sculpted his first horse skull in the 1950s following the death of his pet horse. He returned to the skull motif on many occasions later in his career. The abstract-seeming sculpture has figurative reference points. Through the reduction of form and textured surfaces, Tapper sought to capture childhood impressions of rocky terrain, gushing rapids, and the hum of the wind in the woods.
Mauno Hartman, Horizontal Standstill, 1966–68
Mauno Hartman began sculpting wood in the early 1960s, using salvaged logs from demolished buildings to assemble various structures. His sculptures and reliefs borrow elements from vernacular culture and traditional wooden architecture. The composition of Horizontal Standstill is designed around the harmonious balance of horizontal and vertical elements.
Hartman once said: “I don’t consciously strive to build anything National Romantic. These are abstract works, much as they might evoke history and tradition through the presence of weatherworn timber and old logs. These sculptures are pure structures. I believe all the arts share the same basic elements. Be it music, literature or theatre, it’s all about rhythm, dynamic tension and holistic interaction.”
Juhani Harri, Sounds of the Night I, 1970–71
Juhani Harri was a pioneer of Finnish assemblage art. He developed his distinctive style of transforming found objects into art through a series of material experiments in the early 1960s. Harri had a gift for elevating even the humblest of objects and creating subtle aesthetic effects with minimal elements. He sourced his found objects from all manner of places. Quoting Picasso, he once said: “I do not seek. I find”.
Harri drew inspiration from his international precursors in the assemblage genre. His box assemblages were inspired by handcrafted miniature ships displayed in boxes or bottles. Through these artefacts popular in Ostrobothnia, he understood that an object can be meaningful in its own right, not just as a picture.
Downstairs: Works of the last decades
The Sara Hildén Foundation is continually expanding its collection with new acquisitions honouring the collection’s existing modernist legacy. From the outset, the main focus has been on painting and sculpture. This exhibition’s curatorial selection offers a compelling reflection of the latest decades of Finnish art and its great stylistic and thematic diversity.
Marika Mäkelä, Eastern Flowers, 2013 and Tibetan Bridal Saddle, 2013
Marika Mäkelä is among the noted Finnish women artists who made their breakthrough in the 1980s.
Mäkelä’s glitter-dusted oil paintings on relief-like woodblocks pay homage to women’s crafting traditions. The artist has said: “Chainsaw meets embroidery in my art, which in many ways resembles weaving. I’m only worried that I haven’t packed in enough detail! I want the surfaces to be overflowing with ornament!”
The rich decorative detail of Tibetan Bridal Saddle is reminiscent of Art Nouveau ornamentation, while Eastern Flowers brings to mind the extremely stylised flowers typical of the artist’s earlier career.
Leena Luostarinen, The Tiger, 1985–86
Leena Luostarinen ranked among Finland’s leading Neo-expressionists of the 1980s. She made her artistic breakthrough in 1981 with a solo exhibition themed around big cats.
Tiger was one of the paintings featured in her breakthrough exhibition. The reclining feline has been interpreted as the artist’s vicarious self-portrait. The artist herself confessed to identifying with its untameable, guarded nature. Luostarinen’s tiger has a handsome sculpturesque presence.
The real content of the painting is not the tiger, however, but colour, which was more important to the artist than the actual subject. Succulently textured pigment is a signature characteristic of Luostarinen’s style. She applied paint by vigorously smearing, drizzling and splashing virtually unmixed pigments directly onto the canvas.
Kaarina Kaikkonen, The Sea Was Empty, 1998
Kaarina Kaikkonen is known for her large-scale installations of second-hand men’s shirts and suit jackets. Her use of men’s clothing relates to the artist’s personal loss. Loss and longing have inspired her quest to search for meaning beyond surface reality.
Seascapes and references to emptiness are recurring elements in Kaikkonen’s oeuvre. The artist says: “Humans have inhabited this universe for only the blink of an eye. The sea has always been here.”
Kaikkonen has been commissioned to create second-hand clothing installations in public spaces all around the world, often working in collaboration with local communities.
Timo Heino, Whip Master, 2007
Timo Heino describes Whip Master as a “three-dimensional drawing”. The piece consists of a dead, weathered pine tree encased in rubber. Rubber is a by-product of oil, while oil is fossilised biomass. A tree that has grown and died in the soil of modernity thus wears a grafted skin made of substances extracted from ancient seas.
Rubber is also a fetish material associated with sadomasochist subculture, as suggested by the work’s title.
The bird’s eggs resting on the tree branches are from a private collection. Most of them are the eggs of birds native to deciduous forests, but there are also exotic species among them. Eggs are vulnerable to falling from tree branches, invoking precarity, but also freedom, as broken shells suggest the idea of liberation.
Toni R. Toivonen, Crucifixion, 2018
Crucifixion captures an animal’s last presence on earth.
The artist has placed the carcass of a dead horse on a brass plate, creating its imprint with the aid of moisture, time and pressure. The golden sheen of the brass alludes to the use of gold in art history. The artist also describes the golden shimmer as a contrast to the rawness of the content.
It took the artist many weeks to assemble, prepare and execute the work. The finished piece is coated with a special varnish that heightens the colour tones and adds depth to the image.
Like Baroque paintings, the piece is a memento mori – a reminder of life’s transience. The artist says: “We need death to understand life. Only shadows can show us the source of light.”
Marianna Uutinen, From the series Plastic Heaven 10, 2015
Marianna Uutinen made her artistic breakthrough in the 1980s, and she has recently gained renown with her paintings consisting of three-dimensional acrylic draperies attached to canvas.
The artist says: “For me, materiality is everything. My paintings straddle the middle ground somewhere between the abstract and the representational. The viewer may perhaps recognise my sources of inspiration, but everyone is welcome to interpret my art through their own reactions, as a spatial experience.”
Susanne Gottberg, The Way It Is, 2022
Susanne Gottberg’s art explores the essence of painting in its varied modes of being. Her work examines questions related to perception, form, content, light, darkness, the real and the illusory.
Gottberg’s recent works foreground harsh contemporary realities from which we cannot avert our gaze. This painting is based on a self-portrait photographed via a mirror. The reality that unfolds in the painting is ambiguous, inviting us to look both at the world and within ourselves.