Sinikka Kurkinen (b.1935, Finland) is probably the most significant Finnish artist you haven’t yet heard of. She is a forceful image-thinker, a bold but also subtle colourist. Already in 1968, the Tampere critic Veli-Matti Kaitala called her ‘a colour painter in the grand style.
Kurkinen’s painting is both abstract and figurative, both expressive and constructed. It is unambiguously personal but also of its time, moving with the development of art and visual culture. The ‘grand style’ is usually understood, at least in literature, as being dignified, sublime and eloquent. This may also be a functioning description of Kurkinen’s practice.
Anders Kruger, from the monograph "Sinikka Kurkinen", published in connection with the exhibition at Kunsthalle Kohta in Helsinki, 2022
In 1956, she began her studies at the Finnish Academy of Fine Arts and the Free Art School in Helsinki, later completing an additional year at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière in Paris. After her studies, she returned to her family home, where the landscapes and cultural atmosphere of Eastern Finland provided a continuous source of inspiration. She belongs to the generation of artists who began their careers in post-war Finland, during a period marked by scarcity. The city she chose to settle in was not only a geographical border, but also a cultural one. Within this context, Kurkinen developed as an independent artist, outside rigid stylistic categories. Her work consists primarily of abstract paintings on large-scale surfaces, where smooth textures interact with subtle transitions of light and color. Since 1973–1974, she began to articulate the visual language that would characterize her practice, through drawings and sketches that preceded her final compositions.
Her paintings often carry evocative titles—sometimes metaphoric or paradoxical—which reference elements of nature, the seasons, or familiar everyday objects. These are brought into focus against soft chromatic gradient backgrounds, seen in works like ’Twas a Lovely Summer Evening (1975), Memory of Summer (1975), Do You Remember When (1975), Easter Wreaths (1977), and Just a Little Folk Song That Doesn’t Even Have a Name (1974). In works like Guardians of the Night (1976) and Crazy Moon (1977), the dark blue sky interacts with shapes painted in luminous tones. On a similar background, and with a subtle reference to pop art, Bag in Flight (1973) transforms a plastic bag into a floating object, caught in a dialogue between air and material, an image characteristic of her light and atmospheric visual language. A later version of this theme appears in The Bag Is Flying (1982), where fields of color evoke both daylight and darkness within the same pictorial space. In other works, she frames ordinary subjects within deep, static borders, allowing the central image to emerge dynamically, as in The Curious Ones (1978), Surrounded by the Everyday (1995). In the early 1980s, she moved away from preliminary drawings and watercolors for large compositions, working directly on canvas.
Her exhibition history, while more local than international, includes: the Imatra Art Museum in 1965, 1973, 1991, 2004, 2008, 2018, the Baltic Sea Countries Biennale in Rostock, East Germany (1971), a Nordic traveling exhibition in Denmark and Iceland (1974), the group exhibition Women Artists at Kunsthalle Helsinki (1975), solo exhibitions at Galleria BE’19 in Helsinki (2000, 2003, 2007), and a final presentation in a disused shop space in Lappeenranta in early spring 2020, which lasted four days due to the pandemic.
Her works are in the collections of Imatra Art Museum, The Ateneum (part of the Finnish National Gallery), Lappeenranta Art Museum, Kouvola Art Museum, and include site-specific paintings for public institutions in Imatra. ...
