Heikki Marila: Paintings

Art-historical classics never sit still in Heikki Marila’s hands. In his reinterpretations, they shift and breathe, the familiar architecture of his floral-themed paintings opening a field of boundless experimentation. In his recent works, Marila deliberately steps into unfamiliar terrain, allowing his materials to guide him toward unforeseen forms. These paintings draw upon the floral still lifes of Rachel Ruysch (1664–1750) – a dialogue he began in 2009, one that has since evolved and grown more complex with each successive piece.

Upon these echoes of Ruysch, Marila builds a fresh, shimmering skin. His new works unfold through a porose conversation between gloss and matte: the sheen once concealed beneath dense impasto now rises to the surface, revealing glimpses of underlying strata. His blacks are deeper, their tonalities altered, and the image opens into new layers, while the sheen obscures the original subject. Each painting seems to inhabit two parallel worlds – as though time and space had fractured into separate planes within a single image. The blurred bouquet recedes like a memory, while the glossy surface that overtakes the picture plane disrupts its harmony, unapologetically demanding the viewer’s attention.

The exhibition’s second chapter is the Golden Age series. Marila’s relationship with gold is ambivalent: its historical and symbolic weight initially felt daunting – yet this very unease is precisely what compelled him to confront it. The resulting abstract paintings carry faint echoes of nature, landscape, or even still life. They function as archetypes of painted subjects – reduced, distilled, and yet deeply rooted in pictorial tradition.

Heikki Marila (b. 1966) has exhibited widely across Finland, the Nordic region, and Europe. In 2025, he presented a major solo exhibition at the Sara Hildén Art Museum. His works reside in numerous significant collections, including those of the Sara Hildén Art Museum, Turku Art Museum, HAM Helsinki Art Museum, the Finnish National Gallery, the Jenny and Antti Wihuri Foundation, the TIA collections in the United States, and the Ståhl Collection in Sweden.