ESSI KUOKKANEN

Coiling snails – foretellers and conveyors of messages

"The internal world in a way runs and at times bursts quite uncontrollably out to the physical side. The characters of the paintings are like containers filled with emotions that sometimes splash, leak and well over.

Perhaps it's about a more constant and a slower discharge with the snail figures. In my mind many of them are about shame and curling up to a roll. I guess sliminess relates to that feeling of shame, in a similar way as sweaty palms or underarms can cause embarrassment."

CARETAKERS AND OTHER FRAGILE BEINGS

"A girl (a tree) breaks her arm apart and throws it for the dogs to play in a gesture that – although undoubtedly performed with loving intentions – feels rather exaggerated and thoughtless."

"A cow feeds everyone else apart from her own calf, and a squished tennis ball is being either spanked or caressed by a racket, or possibly both at the same time."

ARS22 – Living Encounters at KIASMA

Essi Kuokkanen was one of the few Finnish artists invited to showcase her work at the 10. installment of the major international contemporary art exhibition series ARS22. The exhibition, titled Living Encounters, featured an extensive selection of Kuokkanen's paintings, and ran until September 4th 2022 at the Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma, Helsinki.

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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more about the artist

ESSI KUOKKANEN: Shapeshifter Dreaming

Coiling snails – foretellers and conveyors of messages

CARETAKERS AND OTHER FRAGILE BEINGS

NOCTURNAL CARNIVAL

works on paper

ARS22 – Living Encounters at KIASMA

ESSI KUOKKANEN