Kaija Hinkula

Finnish artist Kaija Hinkula lets the viewer enter a new world. Utopian vision inspired by a disappearing underwater universe.

Preview of the site-specific installation Boulder Star, created for Pragovka Gallery is artist’s own fantasy world, created in her head and studio. By transporting itself into the gallery space, the installation takes its final form and becomes a space for play and imagination for the audience. In her own words, Hinkula provides them with a manual for modelling a new universe, a manual for understanding it, according to which their own world may or may not come into being.

Kaiji Hinkula’s artistic work takes place in the field of expanded painting, where a spatial intervention is created with the distinctive qualities of painting such as colour and composition. She explores the spatiality of painting and its expanded materiality. According to artist and art theorist Mark Titmarsch, expanded painting can be understood as a free play with painting inspired by Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein’s notion of free play. While the latter considers speech to be free play, Titmarsch applies this principle to painting. In the same way that free play is allowed in tennis despite the rules given, the basic set of conditions that determine a painting can be freely omitted, and in turn other elements can be added, in the case of Boulder Star videos, fabrics, threads, ceramic objects, colored plates and other materials.

Formally, references to the minimalism of 1960’ can be found in Hinkula’s work. However, the austerity and restraint associated with it is absent in her work. We can thus label it with the artist’s own term, fantastic minimalism. The term was coined with some exaggeration in preparation for her previous installation Stargazer for HAM Gallery in Helsinki with art theorist Juha-Heikki Tihinen, but it describes her current work. Although minimalist in its use of monochromatic colour tones and disciplined form, it is also playful, colourful, fantastical and organic in its shapes.

The world created this time is also organic, inviting the viewer under the sea to the coral reefs. Boulder Star in English refers to an endangered species of coral.  Although this environment is primarily a visual inspiration for the artist’s utopian visions, it also brings an environmental aspect to her work, where she creates a fantasy world out of something that may soon no longer be part of the world as we know it today.

Hinkula’s work is also characterised by recycling and repetition of elements, materials and colours. Nevertheless, the final form of the work is created in the gallery space and the individual elements acquire new connotations and meanings both from the artist’s perspective and from the viewer’s perspective. At the same time, they refer to the previous installations, from which the new ones are based and pushed to other levels. 

The artist Kaija Hinkula (b. 1984) holds a Master’s degree in painting from the Academy of Fine Arts in Helsinki and the Saimaa University of Applied Sciences in Finland. Her works are represented in the collections of HAM Helsinki Art Museum, Oulu Art Museum and The Finish State Art Collection.