HARD FEELINGS, SOFT PAINTINGS – Henna Aho
I open the painting, detach it from its stretcher bars, cut along the brushstrokes, shred it senselessly, smear beyond the edges.
I destroy. Then I rearrange the newly created painting fragments. I sew, glue, create contrasts, combine elements intuitively, harmoniously, roughly. I see with fresh eyes. A stormy sea, ocean waves, outer space, a starry sky, semi-abstract figures, sharp-edged words—all tearing through soft paintings.
As a byproduct of my artistic work, I have accumulated numerous paintings that never reached the status of a finished artwork. Not because I didn’t invest time in them—on the contrary, these are the works I have spent countless hours with, trying in various ways to bring them to completion, refining the harmony between form and meaning so that they would meet the criteria of a complete piece. Yet, for some reason, certain works refuse to solve their own mystery. They remain dead ends.
These painting canvases, removed from their frames—(de)constructed ‘dead-end works’—form the basis of the exhibition Hard Feelings, Soft Paintings. The works in the exhibition are paintings created by assembling ‘unresolved’ paintings together, resulting in a (re)construction that takes control over the wild, unresolved content and its mimetic meaning. The paintings exist in the space between collage and mixed media compositions that merge different painting styles.
Henna Aho (b. 1977) is a Turku-based visual artist passionate about serious, performative painting. Since graduating as a painter in 2002, she has worked across various fields of art. She is a candidate member of the Finnish Painters’ Union, a member of the Turku Artists’ Association and Arte. In addition, she is pursuing a doctoral dissertation at Aalto University on collaborative artistic practices. In the spring of 2014, Aho’s works will be exhibited not only at Poriginal Gallery but also in solo exhibitions at Galleria Katariina in Helsinki and Galleria Mältinranta in Tampere.
Translated with ChatGPT