This characterisation of Sinikka Kurkinen is cut from an article by Veli-Matti Kaitala published in the now defunct Kansan Lehti (‘The People’s Newspaper’) in 1968.¹ Such snippets of European high culture, sunken into archival obscurity, are not just quaint virtual artefacts. There is some hope they might help us shed light not just on Kurkinen’s force and originality as a painter, but also how she fits into space and time. We therefore grasp at them when trying to understand the circumstances in which she has lived and worked: everyday reality in south-eastern Finland during the best part of a century, when wars were fought and audiences were first confronted with abstract art.

We immediately want to point out how important it is not to alienate Kurkinen from movements in art to which she has been contributing for decades, also in periods when she exhibited rarely or not at all, by steadily advancing her own positions. We must resist the temptation of readying her for ‘rediscovery’ by declaring her an ‘outsider’. Recontextualising and reappraising her importance as an uncompromising artist is more relevant and responds to a real need.

Karelia was a cultural frontier long before Kurkinen was born on the outskirts of Imatra in 1935. This is not the place to chronicle the rivalry the province has caused between western and eastern overlords throughout the centuries, nor to recapitulate independent Finland’s history of conflict with Russia (in her various incarnations) over it, nor even to try to express what, apart from its natural beauty, makes Karelia so treasured, so mythical. We will limit ourselves to the observation that today, with Russia’s new aggressive stance, the inhabitants of Imatra and other eastern towns must readapt to a life of relative isolation and deprivation along a sealed and dangerous border after some 30 years of permeability and commercial opportunity.

Kurkinen’s artistic achievement is the outcome of decisions made voluntarily or foisted on her by necessity or convention. To be sure, they were embedded in harsh external realities. Her country lived precariously during the Cold War, insisting on its Western social and cultural identity while accommodating the imperial neighbour politically and economically. Her family were smallholder farmers who, unlike others farther east, could avoid the indignity of having to permanently evacuate their homestead but remained trapped in humble economic conditions. The social order of the 1950s and ’60s was oppressive for women in general, and for women artists in particular.

In 1962, after studying for six years at the School of the Finnish Art Academy and the Free Art School, both in Helsinki, and after an additional year at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière in Paris, Kurkinen returned to Imatra and took up a position as curator of exhibitions at the Imatra Art Museum that also included teaching evening classes in fine arts. She soon left this underpaid job and spent much of 1963 and 1964 in Ibiza, working in the studio of fellow Finnish painter Anita Snellman² and making initial contacts with European gallerists.³

She ran out of money, just like in Paris three years before, and in response to her recently widowed mother’s call for help at the farm she settled permanently in the modest family house. She had ‘returned to the forest’ – exactly what her teacher at the Academy, the pioneering abstract painter Sam Vanni, had warned his students against doing.⁴

Towards the end of the 1960s, as she began to exhibit more widely in Finland, Kurkinen gained a reputation as one of the country’s leading women artists and was mentioned by reviewers alongside colleagues such as Eva Cederström,⁵ Laila Pullinen⁶ and Ulla Rantanen.⁷ Yet her visibility was already suffering from the centralised nature of the underdeveloped Finnish art system, almost exclusively focused on Helsinki and in practice closed to practitioners from other parts of the country who couldn’t afford the cost of exhibiting there.

Paradoxically, a decrease in attention to Kurkinen’s work on the national level became noticeable around 1973–74, when she was finding her own artistic bearings after shedding some painterly habits of the previous decade that echoed tachisme, art informel or pop art. Examples of works prefiguring this shift are the canvases During a Month (1969, inspired by the moon landing), Sickles on Table (1970, displaying the real-life agricultural tool rather than its political symbolisation), Change (1971, introducing new recurring themes such as the multiple frame, the organic curve and the half-opened drawer) and Use of Space (1972, where the frame deepens and appears to recess into a geometrically organised night sky).

It was with works such as Different View I–IV (1973), Twin Theme for Colours (1974) or In Search of Form (1974) that Kurkinen really came to inhabit the ‘grand style’ that the newspapers had anticipated for her some years earlier. Her colour thinking, both daring and subtle, had reached the level of sophistication we now rightly consider her signature. From one work to another, she was travelling a path both fully her own and a reflection of its time, within painting and outside of it. Music, for instance, has long been an active source of inspiration for Kurkinen, and her work titles – often intricate, always exquisitely precise – testify to her mastery of the Finnish language and her understated humour. (We have done our best to translate them here.)

Kurkinen has had several solo exhibitions at the Imatra Art Museum: in 1965, 1973, 1991, 2004, 2008 and 2018. In late 2011 and early 2012 the Kouvola Art Museum organised a survey of her work and published a catalogue (in Finnish only) with texts by its director Eero Laajo and by the artist and art historian Sirpa Häkli.⁸ Her latest solo exhibition opened in a disused shop in Lappeenranta in early spring 2020, but because of the pandemic it had to close after four days. Kurkinen participated in the group exhibition ‘Women Artists’ at Kunsthalle Helsinki in 1975 and in a few international group exhibitions, notably a Biennial of countries around the Baltic Sea in Rostock, East Germany, in 1971 and a travelling Nordic survey exhibition in Denmark and Iceland in 1974. Otherwise she hasn’t had much international exposure. She did, however, do three solo exhibitions at Galleria BE’19 in Helsinki while it still existed, in 2000, 2003 and 2007. In his review of the last of these for Helsingin Sanomat, critic Timo Valjakka noted:

The most surprising thing about Kurkinen’s (b. 1935) new paintings is that all those bygone years can hardly be seen in them at all. As a painter she feels decades younger than her actual age. […] It seems to me that Kurkinen has always travelled her own path, an individualist that cannot be squeezed into narrow categories. It is impossible to tell if her work is figurative or abstract, flat or spatial, if it is strict Concretism or landscape painting. Somehow it manages to be all of this at the same time.⁹

In 2008 Kurkinen donated 42 paintings from her earlier years to the Imatra Art Museum, along with a smaller number of distinct early prints and collages. These are outside the scope of our essay, which focuses on the work still in her own possession and thus available for collectors. The same is true of the paintings acquired by Ateneum, the branch of Finland’s National Gallery dedicated to collecting work by artists whose exhibiting careers were launched before 1960,¹⁰ and the work in other Finnish museums, such as the Lappeenranta Art Museum or the Kouvola Art Museum, and various other public and private collections, as well as the in-situ paintings Kurkinen executed for public institutions in Imatra.

 

What to Expect of a Great Artist

The grand style in literature, for which the typical example is John Milton’s epic poem Paradise Lost from 1667, is ‘marked by a sustained and lofty dignity, sublimity and eloquence’.¹¹ It would be possible to identify analogies in the history of Western art – Nicolas Poussin comes to mind, and Bruce Nauman, and Anish Kapoor, but also Hilma af Klint and Agnes Martin and Hito Steyerl – but that is not the task we set for ourselves. We will only note that mastery of the grand style doesn’t automatically make an artist great. It may help, but it may also lead her astray, for instance into believing that mastery and grandeur are in themselves necessary and sufficient conditions for greatness.

While we are reluctant to make sweeping claims about Kurkinen’s art world status, what it is and what it should be, we have, after going through as much of her practice as we have gained access to during three visits to Imatra, concluded that she is fully trustworthy as an artist. This is not as self-evident as it might sound, because building confidence in an artist’s work and thought is a demanding process, almost like learning to read a new alphabet. As we browsed the contents of her two studios to select the works to be reproduced and discussed here, we indeed learned to read, understand and trust her intentions, her delivery within her selected means and, not least, her own assessment of her oeuvre, its meaning and its value. As a result we have become attuned to her dedication to painting and her quest for artistic freedom in, through and beyond painting.

A number of engaging works date from 2020, 2021 and 2022. Kurkinen’s practice is very much an ongoing process, an immersive ‘work of the mind’ (our tentative rendering of the helpful German term Geistesarbeit) that inevitably has consequences for life as well as for art. Anyone would have to pay a price for abandoning herself to such intensive creation: too much or too little visibility and recognition, or just a lifelong sense of bafflement about how the social in art (be it simply as the promotion of an individual artist’s work) relates to artmaking as a mental and spiritual process.

Our urge to introduce Kurkinen’s practice to new audiences is inspired by confidence in its technical and visual quality, but also in its ability to generate what Theodor W. Adorno, whose aesthetic home turf was music rather than visual art, called truth-content.

Art is directed towards truth, it is not itself immediate truth: to this extent truth is its content. By its relation to truth, art is knowledge; art itself knows truth in that truth emerges through it. As knowledge, however, art is neither discursive nor is its truth the reflection of an object.¹²

Adorno’s caveat about discursive knowledge is pertinent and explains why it would be futile and reductive to consider Kurkinen’s paintings agents of knowledge production. They don’t teach us to see or tell us anything we didn’t already know, at least not intentionally. Rather, they presuppose a certain level of visual competence in us as viewers, a combination of conscientious looking and imagination, of capturing what is being divulged and summoning up what is being withheld.

On this fundamental level Kurkinen’s work is, in other words, not different from that of other artists for whom claims to greatness can be made. It is, to a certain extent, a self-contained system, but one that also includes and involves what is exterior to it – not least us as viewers. When we first encountered her practice, we found ourselves asking the very questions (again probably not in discursive fashion but more as a wordless inner monologue) that we would ask to understand what to expect of a great artist.

This is not to suggest that a checklist for greatness in art would ever be possible. Quite the opposite: one of the few absolute statement that can credibly be made about art is that it doesn’t lend itself to classification relying on criteria. Yet perhaps some level of common understanding could be reached if it is formulated as a set of both/and paradoxes. Perhaps an artist is more likely to be great if the work is characterised by grandeur and intimacy, consistency and unpredictability, stubbornness and adaptability, ambition and humility?

 

 

Windows to the Subjects

We have attempted to contextualise and evaluate Kurkinen’s practice in rather general terms, offering a shortcut to its ‘whys’. Why has her career taken certain turns, and why should we pay attention to her as an artist? We will now continue with the ‘whats’ and ‘hows’. What concerns have driven her and how has articulated them in her work?

First, it is worth noting how irrelevant the whole notion of disadvantage is, especially when coupled with prescriptive and hierarchical ideas about centre and periphery, macrocosm and microcosm. The upstairs studio in one’s childhood home, doubling as a repository for one’s life’s work, need not be seen as a smaller or more remote version of some imagined other life in another location, less mistakable for ‘the forest’. One of Kurkinen’s strengths is her resolve to stay on her own path. When one has cast few sideways glances at recognition for half a century, one probably has little existential need for it. Which may be exactly why one deserves it.

In the late 1930s, just before the convulsions of war, the neighbouring farm hired some day labourers and one of them introduced himself as a taivaanrannan maalari, a commonly used Finnish expression for an itinerant unskilled worker who is also a lost existence, an unfortunate dreamer. To the child that Kurkinen was at the time the literal meaning – ‘painter of the edge of the sky’ – described a profession she hoped to make her own one day. Her parents bought one of the labourer’s last physical possessions, a wooden chair, which she later painted a bright yellow. She still treasures it.

When we look at Kurkinen’s oeuvre, and especially when we write about it, we are struck by the strong correlation between the paintings and their titles. The bond between painted and linguistic image often feels quite unbreakable. Yet we should treat both with caution and avoid falling into the trap of literal interpretation that Kurkinen so skilfully sets for us.

The diptych Joys in the Tower (1988) may be a good place to begin. The painting celebrates the tactile joys of applying red, ruby, rose, pink, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple, black and white paint to a canvas that the naked eye perceives as human skin. Why, then, are we tempted to decipher its title as a reference to chaste self-enclosure in an ivory tower of sorts? Kurkinen is deliberately offering us contradictory metaphors, using language to scramble our reception of paint and vice versa. Another example of this is The Secret of the Oval (2003). Here the support is a wooden oval primed with gesso, but again the literalness of the title is only partly borne out by the painting itself, a study in the angular organisation of a pictorial space rather than a meditation on its smooth outline.

In Windows to the Subjects (1977) Kurkinen turns up the rhetorical heat and enlists both the painting and its title for the task of recapitulating some motifs of her productive 1970s: the waves on the lake in summer, the fluttering curtain at night, the opened letter as geometric abstraction, the sweet memory-image of strawberries in a birchbark cone. Perhaps she wants to see how far she can push this experiment before it collapses under the weight of so much self-reflection. The golden ochre framework is already cracking up and becoming deformed.

In fact much of her subject-matter had crystallised into recursive visual tropes by the mid-1970s. In Fond Memory (1972) evokes the parcel of land she tilled with her mother, one of thousands of small farms in post-war Finland, while Childhood Games and My Toy Cows (both 1978) zoom in on the ground where once, as a little girl, she played with simple self-made toys.

Locatedness is a topic that Kurkinen rarely articulates this overtly. Typically she will transform it into something both loftier and lighter, for instance visualisations of the waves on nearby lake Saimaa, Finland’s largest, in varying states of abstraction. Her most iconic treatment of this theme is found in The Waves Are Calling (1974), which is also a riveting example of how movement (and thus time) can be conveyed in painting, with simple yet powerful means. In Memory of the Wave (1997) reformulates the same theme more than two decades later, now as a concern for pulse and pattern. Both these paintings may serve as case-studies for Kurkinen’s use of blue, but in paintings such as Flight (1978), Shore (1989) or Blue Bath (2002) she dares herself also to use yellow. What is striking is how she whips up layered, syncopated visual rhythms with little else than simplified wave shapes and gradations of a single colour mixed with white.

Mirage in Summer (1977) picks up the located trope of the inland body of water, without visible surface movement this time, and adds overt references to the painter’s brushes. (They recur in other paintings from the late 1970s that are not included here.)

Kurkinen also features other artist tools and devices, frequently some variation of the frame. In Easter Supper (1974) it is the narrow frame and the palette, in Sweets for the Road (1977) the decorated frame and the plinth and in The Curious Ones (1978) the deep frame (which might also be a shallow niche). Tipping into Red (1984) offers a simpler version tof the frame, as blue background to the colour field mentioned in the title. It may be difficult to distinguish these frame from windows. Such ambiguous framing devices occur in Margin in Heat (1991), A Certain Labyrinth (1993), Act and Consequence (2003), Why Towards the Night (2003) and Windows for Outside and Inside (2010).

In other paintings Kurkinen focuses her own and her viewers’ attention to what shines through from the outside world. In both versions of Plucked Out of the Air (1972 and 1985) a light blue sky is made to interact with flimsy shapes in a range of upbeat colours. With a nod to pop art, Bag in Flight (1973) turns both the reddish bag and the blue background into emblems of flight. Utensils of an Angel (1993) is an early forerunner of the looser, more aerated style of painting that will dominate Kurkinen’s output in the 2010s and ’20s, and the wonderfully titled A Flower for Cubism (2000) does away with the entire distinction between the frame and what it frames and reformulates both heaven and earth as gridded windowpanes of blue and green.

We may also be asked to contemplate the night sky, in paintings such as Guardians of the Night (1976), Crazy Moon (1977) or I Want the Moon (1985), the fluid nocturnal composition From the Window (1991) and the overtly theatrical On the Stage of the Night (1997).

Elsewhere night and day appear to happen simultaneously. Colour fields doubling as the sky tilt abruptly from light hues into darkness, or vice versa. This is true about The Bag Is Flying (1982) and Tent for the Lean One (1990).

In the Wind (1977) produces a similar effect, but its most dramatic contrast is provided by a colourfully striped pictorial field bleeding into a ghostly white and suggesting a billowing curtain in a window letting in the dark. The candy colours of the night reappear in what looks like the half-opened drawer of a bedside table. The combined effect is eerie and mysterious.

In 1975 Kurkinen created a significant but very particular body of work in defiance of the expectation that artists should me making politically engaged work (and, it was understood at the time, promote a leftist agenda of didactic figuration). She stuck with the figuration, ignored the agitprop and ventured into an iconography that might be mistaken for national romanticism. In actual fact the stylised but true-to-life renderings of berry baskets, cones, trumpets and rings made of birch bark revisit a traditional material culture that was still an lively presence in her childhood, and their titles reference folk songs (again both traditional and stylised, and mostly lost in translation) that she and her best friends used to sing and collect in hand-written books: ’Twas a Lovely Summer Evening, Strawberries Are Red, Memories of Summer, Heartfellt Greetings.

 

 

 

Cloud and Example

Needless to say, the effect of immediacy that Kurkinen’s work produces in us is a carefully crafted illusion, which in turn is the result of her long experience of image-building and technical problem-solving in painting. At some point in the first half of the 1980s she stopped filling her sketchbooks with pencil and colour pencil sketches for the full-scale paintings, as if she no longer needed to elaborate her ideas on paper before committing them to canvas.

Kurkinen’s thematic and compositional thought had merged with the colour thinking that we have already identified as one of her core achievements. She had long been determined to try all available colours and combinations of colours for visual, representational and emotional effect. This strategic probing of possibilities continues in the titles, with poignant examples such as Choreography in Yellow (1982), Little-Riding-Hood Red (1983), Yellow Week (1987), Sailing in the Blue (2000), From a Green Star (2009), The Will of Red (2013), Blue and Red Life-Bearer (2016) and Then in Blue (2020).

It would be tempting to try to ascribe spiritual intentions to Kurkinen’s intense and investigative use of colour, straight from the tube or mellowed with white. Yet we should tread cautiously. Her true commitment is to painting. Titles such as Straight from the Tube (1996) or Raise Up Your Spirit (1997) indicate as much. Most probably they are ironic, since the first painting is highly nuanced in its choice of colours and their application and the second one contains no easily decodable visual references to either religious content or upward moment. It does, however, offer some unusually explicit transitions between colours (bottle green, golden brown, deep purple) that appear only rarely in Kurkinen’s oeuvre.

Two earlier works may be mentioned as additional examples of her creative irony. In The Painter‘s Rug (1984) and The Painter’s Furs (1986) she pokes fun of the motley everyday reality of being a colour painter. Repeated narrow brushstrokes in primary and broken colours may not meet all the requirements of ‘good painting’, but they can be enlisted as representations of individual yarns or hairs in an outlandish applied art project.

Kurkinen keeps inventing new variations on the theme of articulating the world, as she knows and sees it, in every colour possible. Her most recent production brings together structured juxtapositions of complementary colours that manage to be invitingly light or dense without tipping into the decorative, as in Fine-Tunings by the Fan (2017), The Cushion in the Corner (2018) or Bridges in Blue (2021), with an almost sketchy but nonetheless grand fluidity that she is still exploring. It is perhaps best exemplified by smaller canvases such as Calmness of Mind or Herbs of the Night (both 2021).

This observation on the accommodation of supposed opposites – colour and composition, structure and looseness, sincerity and playfulness – brings us to the painting that we have chosen to represent Kurkinen’s oeuvre in all its richness and greatness. Cloud and Example (1987) is not only rather large but also unmistakably grand in both concept and execution. It may be characterised as a thought experiment in colour. The dominant field is made to appear both mild and flat but is neither. It floats into both warm and cold green tones, depending on what comes into contact with it. The horizontally organised composition hinges on half-hidden symmetries, notably that between the side bars in the lower left and right corners with their upper edges rounded outwards, which also indicate sky and earth, daylight and the darkness of night. This pictorial reality consists of continuities and disruptions between figures and grounds, backgrounds and foregrounds, areas of flatness and nuanced gradation, straight and curved lines, matching and clashing colours.

An unusual touch is the canvas left white for the cloud singled out for mentioning in the title, which at the same time is curiously fenced in by a rectilinear field of lighter, colder green that doesn’t quite pass for sky-blue. Concerning the second noun of the title, it is meaningful to dwell on a point of translation. The Finnish word esikuva means example to someone rather than example of something. It explicitly points forward to things it wishes to bend into its own likeness. Technically Cloud and Example is one of Sinikka Kurkinen’s most finished paintings; thematically it is wide open towards the futures it seeks to influence.

Anders Kreuger

Notes

1. Veli-Matti Kaitala, ‘Ylikäynehet Imatran – taidevierailun satoa’ (‘Excesses of Imatra: Harvest from an Art Visit’) in Kansan Lehti, 17 April 1968, quoted in Sirpa Häkli, ‘Sinikka Kurkinen – vuodet 1956–1975’ (‘Sinikka Kurkinen: The Years 1956–1974’), in Anna-Kaarina Kippola (ed.), Sinikka Kurkinen. Kouvola: Kouvola Art Museum Poikilo, 2011, p.19.

2. Anita Snellman (1924–2006), Finnish painter, influential as a teacher of painting at the School of the Finnish Art Academy in Helsinki in 1971–79. Artist of the Year at the Helsinki Festival in 1979. Lived in Ibiza and Helsinki.

3. See Sirpa Häkli, op. cit., pp.13–14.

4. Sam Vanni (1908–92), Finnish painter of Jewish origin, born Samuel Besprosvanni in Viipuri. Studied in London and Paris (at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière) in the late 1930s. One of the founders of the Prisma group in 1955. Influential teacher at the School of the Finnish Art Academy in Helsinki.

5. Eva Cederström (1909–95), Finnish painter and printmaker who also studied at the Académie de la Grange Chaumière in Paris. Teacher at the School of the Finnish Art Academy in Helsinki in 1965–74.

6. Laila Pullinen (1933–2015), internationally recognised Finnish sculptor who experimented with using explosives to shape metal. First female chair of the Finnish Sculptors’ Union in 1990–93. Her work can now be seen in the Sculpture Park at Nissbacka Manor in Vantaa, her former home.

7. Ulla Rantanen (1938), Finnish painter and printmaker. Artist of the Year at the Helsinki Festival in 1985. In recent years she has lived and worked in Kenya for longer periods.

8. Anna-Kaarina Kippola (ed.), op. cit.

9. Timo Valjakka, ‘Oman tiensä kulkija. Sinikka Kurkisan maalauksia 4.3. saakka Galleria BE’19:ssä’ (‘Travelling Her Own Path: Sinikka Kurkinens Paintings until 4 March at Galleria BE’19’) in Helsingin Sanomat, 3 March 2007.

10. Kurkinen first exhibited her work in Imatra in 1955. Ateneum bought three works by her during Dr. Soili Sinisalo’s directorship: Unet kulkee (‘Dreams of Passing’, 1999), acquired in 2000; Syvällä syksyssä (‘Deep in Autumn’, 2000) and Tarkoitus lämmittää (‘Intention to Heat’, 2003), acquired in 2005.

11. Merrian-Webster’s definition, available online at https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/grand%20style.

12. Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory (transl. Robert Hullot-Kentor). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997, p.282.