Heli Heikkinen

LIKE GRASS THROUGH ASPHALT

Through painting, I interpret moods around me. The characters in these works are often rather young, some even children. Their lives are ahead of them.
 
I started working on this exhibition just shy of two years ago. Russia had invaded Ukraine. Other threats, too, felt increasingly real: more wars, species going extinct and ever-shrinking habitable zones.
 
Things didn’t get any better. New hells keep crashing down.
 
And still. Light hits an opposing wall, making it change colour. It’s all rather a wonder. A force lives within me. Within us. Life itself. Like blades of grass cracking through asphalt.
 
 
On the screen in the window, there is a series of spur-of-the-moment early spring and autumn drawings, made on a tablet, from Maresme, a county to the northeast of Barcelona on the Catalan coast.

paintings (heliheikkinen.com)