6. – 30.8.2026

Ilari Hautamäki has recently turned his attention to landscape painting, approaching landscape both as a visual motif rooted in art history and as an emotional and existential experience. “Landscape offers a place where I can freely explore the relationship between nature, emotions, memories, history, and the present, as well as the question of being in the world itself.”

The overlapping, interwoven landscapes and their horizons stretching into infinity evoke utopian spaces and timeless dreamscapes. While the works resonate strongly with contemporary environmental concerns, Hautamäki is less interested in imagining dystopian futures than in seeking solace and deepening his own relationship with nature. How do I experience nature, its presence, and its meaning? “We are living in the midst of a climate crisis that affects each of us. I can’t help but think about it when I paint,” Hautamäki says.

The paintings draw not only on the history of landscape painting—from Flemish masters to Japanese woodblock prints and abstract modernism—but also on music. The exhibition takes its title from Fourth World, the musical genre developed in New York in the 1980s that fused elements of world music with modern electronic sound, bringing together musical traditions from the so-called First and Third Worlds to create something entirely new.

In a similar way, Hautamäki’s paintings merge abstraction and representation, geometry and organic form. Alongside these new syntheses, his enduring interest in constructing space and atmosphere through the interplay of color and form remains central to his practice. Each painting in the exhibition possesses its own distinct reality and emotional resonance—its own boundless world.

Ilari Hautamäki is a visual artist from Helsinki. He graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in 2011. Hautamäki mainly works with painting, but also makes oil pastels on paper, graphic art and works for public spaces. His paintings move between the figurative and the abstract, exploring colour, form and rhythm. In his paintings, the organic and industrial worlds meet, creating tensions, spaces and moods. He has held solo exhibitions at, among others, HAM Gallery, Helsinki Contemporary and Forum Box and participated in group exhibitions at, among others, Aine Art Museum, Mänttä Art Week, Kunsthalle Helsinki and Sinne. Hautamäki’s works are represented in many public collections, such as the collections of HAM, HUS, Hämeenlinna Art Museum, Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma and the Bank of Finland, and in numerous private collections.