Born 1961 in Pieksämäki, Finland. Lives in Helsinki, FI.
With great focus, and not without irony and humour, Marianna Uutinen’s works explore the abstract structures of everyday perceptions and how to give them concrete form. Her works can be based on commonplace phenomena or clichés from the world of fashion, advertising, TV and music. Her approach is exceedingly direct and the works have a strong physical presence, encouraging the viewers themselves to create the painting and its meaning. Uutinen has used a variety of techniques, including painting, photography and three-dimensional objects, often combining them in her works. She pipes paint onto the canvas, or moulds paint into sculptures, she has worked with paint moulded on bubble-wrap, a material customarily used to protect art during transport. She paints with a roller, a tool normally used by another kind of painter, or, as in the works in this exhibition, drapes seductive, fluorescent-pink acrylic paint in big sheets across the canvas. Exploiting the expected illusoriness of painting, she plays with the concept of what is real in our image-based reality.
Education
1991–92 Institut des Hautes Etudes en Arts Plastiques, Paris, FR
1980–85 The Academy of Fine Arts, Helsinki, FI
Selected bibliography
Pilvi Kalhama: “Indefiable painting… and looking through it”, Marianna Uutinen, Helsinki, 2007
Sabine Folie: “Golden bullet”, Marianna Uutinen, Helsinki, 2007
Lars Bang Larsen: ”What Your Mother Never Told About Painting”, North – Contemporary Art from Northern Europe, Vienna, 2000
Maaretta Jaukkuri: “Missing Painting”, Arkipelag, Stockholm, 1998
Gertrud Sandqvist: Marianna Uutinen, Helsinki, 1995