20.11.–21.12.2025

Kohta concludes its series of exhibitions by younger Nordic artists with ‘Tea Bladder’, a selection of recent paintings (in oil on canvas, with some variations) and painting-related objects by Netherlands-based Finnish artist Iiris Riihimäki (1997).

She has made the decision, not too common among her peers, to study outside of Finland, and after securing a BFA from the Gerrit Rietveld Academy in 2023 she is now a second-year participant in the post-graduate programme at De Ateliers. Both institutions are in Amsterdam.

Her exhibition captures an aesthetic move that may be more characteristic of the Low Countries, one of the most densely populated areas in Europe, than of the Nordic region, where towns are few and far between. Instead of insisting on the primacy (and, by inference, the supremacy) of nature as a source of inspiration, Riihimäki embraces the natural – a floral pattern here, a wood-like veined texture there – as a function of cultural excavation. She is fishing for motifs in the ocean of manufactured objects and mediated images that we all float in, whether we live in an unaffordable urban sprawl or somewhere rural where a house can sell for as little as 15,000 euros.

If this sounds like a return to Postmodernism and its intertextuality, then maybe it is, but Riihimäki’s generously image-saturated yet cunningly sparse painting couldn’t exist without today’s online resources such as the Finnish real estate Oikotie. That’s where she was looking at those off-the-map houses. One of them featured a sculpture based on Finland’s most-copied painting, Ferdinand von Wright’s Stridande tjädertuppar (The Fighting Capercaillies) from 1886. The burnt sienna underpainting for a painterly rendering of a screenshot of this particular interior became the painting Long-Distance (2025), the poster image for this exhibition.

Although Riihimäki is relatively new to classical oil painting techniques such as layering and glazing, she already has a considerable history with cultural layering, often grounded in personal experience. Remembering her mother’s interminable home improvements, her dream of the perfect Swedish or English cottage, she made Mother’s Lore (2024), a painted image of a stencilled Laura Ashley plate on a painted table. The edges of the plate press against those of the picture. The acknowledgment that flowers should belong to nature presses against the acceptance that they also serve an industrial complex of nostalgic suburban outfitting thriving on what Riihimäki calls ‘the extraction of wilderness’.

Her painting maps how the natural world, in itself beyond taste, is claimed by humans as a tool for imposing their own world-view. Along with a few smaller canvases like Diamond Industrial (2024), where she treats the depicted object (another plate) as a subjectivity capable of storing and accessing its own memories of how it has been used, the exhibition also includes an object that opens up to painting much in the same way. But also the other way round, as it were: not through depiction but through materials that embody painting and allude to it. The most economical way to describe Mrs. Vice Versa (2025) is to list the materials that make it up: hair-imitating swimming cap, bubble wrap, canvas roll, fur coat hooks. The installation of these elements, reminiscent of an oversized matchstick casually leaning against the wall, becomes a portrait of the painter through her own materials but also an integral part of her dialogue with the world through painting.

‘Tea Bladder’ is realised with support from the Nordic Cultural Fund and the Finnish Cultural Foundation. In due time, it will be accompanied by an essay on Iiris Riihimäki by Becket NWM.