Stig Baumgartner works with painting, drawing and video. The themes and colours in his abstract paintings are inspired by his surroundings; landscapes or urban settings. The painted shapes are combined to form individual entities, like portraits of objects or sculptures imbued with character and psychological tension. The works featured in this exhibition are part of the series Hakunila paintings. A few years ago, feeling dissatisfied with a painting, Baumgartner was prompted to cover parts of it with a black square. This new format gave rise to a series of paintings that he later associated to specific places, especially Hakunila, a suburb built mainly in the 1970s, not far from Helsinki, where Baumgartner grew up. The paintings reminded him of certain buildings and the prefabricated modules they were constructed with, along with the characteristic colours of modern, mass produced high-rise housing from that period. The works are not based on sketches of buildings or people, however; titles such as Håkan, Philip and Night Light are merely Baumgartner’s way of processing memories and impressions from his childhood in Hakunila in his paintings.