NELLI PENNA & LAURA UKKONEN exhibition at Critical Gallery

NELLI PENNA (b.1982) and LAURA UKKONEN (b.1977) bring to the Critical Gallery an exhibition of most traditional paintings and drawings: landscapes, interiors and portraits.

Penna and Ukkonen prove that also with the most traditional means it’s possible to make relevant contemporary art on important political and philosophical themes. Their work focuses on exploring everyday life: what is the everyday environment we live in, how do we feel in the midst of it — and how can we learn to see it as wonderful, but without self-deception?

Penna and Ukkonen have investigated their ordinary surroundings and painted and drawn their own interpretation of what they see. They have looked at their family members, their reflection in a mirror, an old office building or the courtyard of an apartment block, for example, and then explored, by painting, both these views and their experience of them.

Their works are based on sensory perception, but their aim is clearly not to be just neutral observers. Instead, their works are more a kind of subjective realism. 

One could also speak of expressionism. However, Penna and Ukkonen do not concentrate in their works just on their own emotional state, as is often the case with stereotypical forms of expressionism. Penna and Ukkonen’s works are so strongly rooted in everyday life, and they view their subjects with such a keen eye and awareness of the society around them, that it makes sense to see their art as a kind of realism.

I think what Penna and Ukkonen’s paintings and drawings say is that ”This is the world we live in, this is the everyday, these are the bodies we live in… …and this is what it feels like. The views may be banal or bleak, but see how they teem with life and nuance — just like you!”

Penna’s painting is an original continuation to the landscapes and urban views that Vilho Lampi (1898–1936), Väinö Kamppuri (1891–1972), Väinö Kunnas (1896–1929) and other Finnish painters painted a hundred years ago.

Another tradition she belongs to is that of German New Objectivity (Neue Sachlichkeit) painting. New Objectivity was a style to which many expressionists switched, either wholly or in part, between the First and Second World Wars. The traumas of the war, the insecurities of post-war life and collapse of dreams in the post-war period led many artists to seek support and refuge in everyday life and its representation, trying to see everyday things with fresh eyes and as if for the first time: ”That’s what a loaf of bread looks like. That’s the rain-soaked end of an apartment building. That’s how the mouse munches on the garbage in the corner. How amazing.” 

The New Objectivist painters’ way of staring at everyday life was strikingly tense — probably because of trauma and disillusionment — as if the world depicted in the painting was barely holding together and the sun was about to go permanently overcast. Such a sense of life is not unique. It’s often repeated in historical situations where faith in gods, a good society and a better future has been tested or lost. With the current bioiversity loss and our other colossal, self-inflicted problems, we are living in such a time again. However, the magic trick of the New Objekctivist painters, and also Nelli Penna, is that they are able at the same time to honestly portray a bleak world and how difficult it is to maintain the will to live in the midst of it — and at the same time to see in mere existence, in the fact that the struggle goes on and sometimes the light flickers, a cause for celebration and the possibility of ecstasy. See, for example, the art of Franz Radziwill (1895–1983), alongside Penna. Some of Radziwill’s work is a melancholy depiction of everyday life, while others are a vision of heaven or an apocalyptic dream.

Gustav F. Hartlaub (1884–1963) wrote the following about the exhibition Die Neue Sachlichkeit, Deutsche Malerei seit dem Expressionismus (Mannheim Kunsthalle) he curated in 1925:

”The New Objectivity is the general tendency that currently prevails in Germany, a tendency of cynicism and resignation as hopes have been dashed. This cynicism and resignation constitute the negative side of the New Objectivity; its positive side is the enthusiasm for objectivity, the desire to treat things dispassionately, as they are, without trying to find some ideal meaning in them.”

Hartlaub’s description is unnecessarily bleak, he does not really see the richness of depicting everyday life, the excitement and sense of intensified existence that can come from encountering everyday reality. On the other hand, he clearly understood the value of the neo-classical style when he curated a groundbreaking and important exhibition on it.

Just like their predecessors, Penna and Ukkonen are able to powerfully express the spirit of the times, the social situation and deal with existential challenges through the vistas they paint. They depict extremely mundane and often bleak scenes, without any prettification or sugar-coating, but at the same time theyilluminate these scenes with a magnificent vitality.

Many of us have stood on the balcony of a particularly ordinary apartment building, in the most ordinary suburb in the world, smoking a cigarette or for some other reason, watched the sun set on that view and thought, “Yes, the world is great, it’s not fair, and I’m no good, but it’s great to be here — and keep fighting.” But only few people know how to capture that moment and make it shareable and enlivening for others. Penna can, in her painting Inner Courtyard (2016).

Laura Ukkonen is somewhat related to both Rafael Wardi (1928–2021) and Marjatta Hanhijoki (1948-) as a draughtsman and painter. In her works, the human body is always as fragile, but at the same time teeming with life, as in Wardi’s works. The home interiors in Ukkonen’s works are just as peaceful, and the human figures in them are just as pensive as those of Hanhijoki. And like her predecessors, Ukkonen draws or paints everyday scenes so full of variety of lines and shapes and with such exuberance of colour and nuance that everyday scenes start looking like a paradise or a cornucopia. And yet she does not slip into escapism; the everyday remains the everyday, and in her work there is no escape from it.

One of the things that distinguishes Ukkonen from Wardi and Hanhijoki and many other such glorifiers of everyday life is that the human figures in her pictures always appear not only fragile but also slightly unhappy, sad, stressed or confused, or in a kind of conflicted emotional state, with content and bliss mixed with their opposites. Whereas the human bodies in Hanhijoki’s and Wardi’s paintings are almost always as relaxed as Buddha, the people in Ukkonen’s paintings are possessed by worry and its physical effects. Her works are therefore a curious combination of celebration of everyday life and expression of numbness and anxiety.

Ukkonen herself has also written beautifully about her work and her views on art. In 2023, she held an exhibition called In My Spaces (Shoulder Positions) and wrote this in its information text:

”At home, you are be protected from prying eyes, but you can also be there alone against your will. For women in particular, the home has also traditionally been a centre of social life, which needs to be presented to others. I have tried to capture these conflicting emotions of everyday life. These emotions are reflected in gestures, such as posture and, for example, the position of the shoulders. I draw moments when seemingly nothing is happening. I imagine I am observing the loneliness, shame and embarrassment of not being able to live up to expectations.”

Penna and Ukkonen deal with social and existential issues in their works, but use the most traditional sub-genres of traditional painting: landscape, interior, still life and portrait painting. They are neither nostalgic nor conservative in any sense of the word. Instead, they are artists who prove through their work that it is not necessary to create a new genre or art form in order to say something startling, new and significant. I think that’s great. New ideas, themes and styles are important in all the arts, but it is equally important to continue the tradition and renew it with small tweaks.

Helsinki, 14.2.2025

TEEMU MÄKI

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CRITICAL GALLERY
27.2.–13.4.2025
Opening on Wednesday 26.2.2025, at 17–20:
Doors open at 17.
Opening speech at 18.
CRITICAL CLUB 19–20; Penna, Ukkonen and Teemu Mäki in conversation on ”Can landscape painting be political art?”