Welcome to the exhibition opening of Maija Helasvuo and Niina Räty
on Friday 6th of June 2014 at 18.00 o’clock at Galerie Toolbox.
Maija Helasvuo, sculptor
At the centre of Maija Helasvuo’s art, are the different levels of human feeling. Her sculptures picture peoples basic emotional dynamic; loss, vulnerability, closeness and our dependence on social interaction. Each person is a part of the complete community of humanity. Through communal experience and all the social forms within it, the process of an event is formed, the connection and interaction of which makes up the whole content of human society.
That which acts on the powerful emotions inside society as a directing force is in one way or another a common factor and causes a process of emotional adaptation. Things that happen in our environment affect us. Helasvuo’s sculptures picture this invisible influence, which is at once adaptable and concrete.
Dr. Mika Karhu
Niina Räty, painter
I mostly paint large multi-part series of works.
I create my own photo album via painting, depicting close people and places as seen through my own experiences. I seek the things that life and existence attach to. I choose a situation or a space that is private and universal like a family gathering, holiday in a summer cottage or a plate on a kitchen table. In my paintings, just like in front of a camera there is a composition; a wedding couple just like other wedding couples around the world, a tourist in front of a local sight forms a picture – a composition that we all are familiar with from our own holiday photos.
We try to capture important moments in our own album and as we take the pictures they represent the form of the event. Compositions using this formula illustrate our own life story. Perhaps through this mechanics of social and spatial being we have a fleeting chance of understanding other people.
Surely painting, restructuring the world on a canvas into a more comprehensible shape is always also a form of self-therapy, organising and tidying up one’s own place, choosing a perspective which helps to tolerate life’s chaos. This aspect of the creative process is, besides sharing and reaching out for another person, central to my artistic work.
Niina Räty