8 May – 1 June 2025

In Karoliina Hellberg’s new works, noonday ghosts play hide-and-seek with the light. While her previous exhibition saw snow settling on nocturnal yards, we now find ourselves in a warm day turning into evening. The time here is quiet, gentle and in the air, not mechanically ticking, violently determined by the pealing of bells or linearly imprisoned in the grid of a calendar. Its rhythm is instead that of a beating heart, of recurring memories and visiting premonitions.

Hellberg is fascinated by time, and painting is her way of dealing with its passage and how it becomes layered. In preparing this exhibition, her attention was caught by images of 17th-century Scottish sundials on the pages of books on gardening. These obelisk-like structures typically had engraved messages on their sides and were fitted with several gnomons, each indicating a different attribute of time, light, or emotion. Rather than displaying exact time, their purpose was often to serve as a reminder of the beauty and impermanence of life: I count the sunny hours. But soon it will be night.

In the realm of Macbethian witches, past, present and future wander in Hellberg’s gardens in the company of aesthetic phantoms – a term that for the artist denotes something charged or forgotten between the self and the other. Absent and present. Dreams, echoes, anticipation. Beautiful, sorrowful, compelling. These elements form the artist’s enigmatic and distinctive visual language, a semiotic system populated by recurring motifs such as oysters, roses, half-smoked cigarettes, and figures foaming inside glass balls or frozen into sculptures. With every magnificent oil painting and delicate watercolour, the reality of Hellberg’s works expands and deepens. A wallpaper produced at the Ubu Noir lithography workshop in Tallinn and a wall object created in collaboration with carpenter Ville Aakula, add pieces to the temporal construction of the exhibition.

In the endless rooms and gardens of Hellberg’s houses, layers of time and spaces of light become organically interlaced and fold into one another. In some corner, a secret lush hiding spot opens up – a place to drowse away for a while. On waking up from the sweet afternoon nap, the shadows of the approaching evening already press gently on the skin. Time told by the sun is uncertain, yet inevitable.

– Oona Latto

Karoliina Hellberg (b. 1987) lives and works in Helsinki. She graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in 2015 and received the Pro Arte Award from the Didrichsen Art Museum in 2018. Hellberg has held solo exhibitions in Helsinki, Copenhagen, London, Reykjavik, and Stockholm, among other places. She has also participated in many group exhibitions, including Amos Rex, Helsinki (2021); EMMA – Espoo Museum of Modern Art (2021); Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma, Helsinki (2020), and Kuopio Art Museum (2018). She has work in the collections of the British Museum, Saastamoinen Foundation, Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma, Päivi and Paavo Lipponen Foundation, Helsinki Art Museum HAM, as well as numerous private collections in Finland, Sweden, Denmark, England, Belgium, Switzerland, the United States, and elsewhere.

The artist’s work has been supported by the Arts Promotion Centre Finland (Taike).