ESSI KUOKKANEN
ESSI KUOKKANEN (b. 1991, Pieksämäki) lives and works in Helsinki. Kuokkanen perceives her creative process as a circular movement, where images, painting and text turn into one another and into something strange. With a shrewd but mischievous and sensitive brush, she investigates and illustrates the contradictions, hypocrisies and distortions of our world. Instead of cynicism or condemnation, there is compassion and gentleness in her gaze. Kuokkanen is interested in the physicality of emotion – how events in the mind create a physical reaction in the body.
Apart from her second solo show at Galerie Anhava, a wide selection of her works in currently on view at the major international contemporary art exhibition ARS22 – Living Encounters at the Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma (Helsinki, FI), and as part of Touch, the collection exhibition of Saastamoinen Foundation at EMMA Museum of Modern Art (Espoo, FI). Kuokkanen has work in numerous major collections, including those of the Jenny and Antti Wihuri Foundation, the Finnish State Art Commission, the Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma and the Saastamoinen Foundation, as well as in many private collections in Finland and the Nordic countries. In 2019 Essi Kuokkanen received the Finnish Art Society’s Ducat Prize.
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Shithead, 2022
