25.04.2025-04.01.2026

The Free Art School’s anniversary exhibition presents the school’s 90-year history and its significance in the development of Finnish painting and modernism. Presented in loose chronological order, the exhibition’s aim is to find the common thread – the spirit of the school – that binds the school’s nine decades together.

The history of the Free Art School and the artists who studied and taught there are approached through Leonard and Katarina Bäcksbacka’s donated collection, which is the heart of HAM and the City of Helsinki’s art collection. The art gallery Taidesalonki, founded by the Bäcksbackas in Helsinki in 1915, showcased the same artists who studied and taught at the school during its first decades.

The Free Art School was founded in 1935 by Maire Gullichsen. In its first years, the school promoted the principles of French modern painting. Modelled after the “free academies” of Paris, the Free Art School provided an alternative to the Finnish academic art education.

In the 1950s, the teachers and students of the Free Art School formed a hub of concretism, led by Unto Pusa and Sam Vanni. In the 1970s, pure abstract colour painting, Josef Albers’s colour theory, and the influences of American painting introduced by the school’s teachers, Tor Arne and Carolus Enckell, became the school’s defining features, lasting for decades. At the end of the 1990s, the school broke away from Albers, and the journey towards the diversity of contemporary painting began.

The exhibition includes works by William Lönnberg, Tove Jansson, Sigrid Schauman, Elga Sesemann, Ole Kandelin, Unto Pusa, Rafael Wardi, Torger Enckell, Tor Arne, Carolus Enckell, Jani Hänninen, Mari Sunna, Paavo Paunu, Elina Merenmies, and Erik Creutziger, among others.

The exhibition is curated by Timo Valjakka and Satu Metsola.