Helsinki Contemporary
CHART | ART FAIR 2018

Helsinki Contemporary has the pleasure to show Miikka Vaskola's paintings and Roland Persson's sculptures at CHART Art Fair 2018, Copenhagen. Both artists have created new sets of artworks for the fair.
The two artists, working with completely different media – sculpture and painting – have a distinctive connection in the materiality of the artworks that manifests itself in both of the artists' work as warm and inviting, yet mystical and intriguing.

Roland Persson is known for his painterly, surrealist silicone sculptures, which he casts in moulds made from real objects. The material is temptingly, alluringly tactile, inviting us to look closer (and, if it were allowed, even touch). Taxidermy animals are reoccurring objects that Persson utilizes in his artistic process, but in the most recent works he has, in addition to fauna, also focused on flora and using plants as starting point in the casting process.
Miikka Vaskola's oeuvre consists of abstract landscapes and figurative imagery, which play between distance and proximity. Vaskola is best known for his large-scale paintings with material experiments on unprimed canvas incorporating layers of ink, iron oxide, charcoal and chalk, that build up a very recognizable, even immersive, aesthetic where the substances are absorbed by the canvas, not staying on the surface.

Both artists also work with figurative subject matter, although in Vaskola’s case the figurative always goes hand in hand with abstract works. While Vaskola, in his portrait paintings, ponders questions of what it means to be human, Persson has approached questions of the relationship between man and animal - and the environment - in his body of work. A surreal, or dreamlike, feeling, a feeling you are not able to define right away, but which can stay with you, in the back of your head, long after first coming in contact with the artwork.
Roland Persson's artwork will also be shown in the public spaces of Kunsthal Charlottenborg during the Fair.
Photographic artist Perttu Saksa's poetic documentary Animal Image (2017) will be screened as part of the Fair's Film programme.