2.2. — 25.2.2024

One need not be a Chamber – to be Haunted –
One need not be a House –
The Brain has Corridors – surpassing
Material Place –

Far safer, of a Midnight Meeting
External Ghost
Than its interior Confronting –
That Cooler Host.

Far safer, through an Abbey gallop,
The Stones a’chase –
Than Unarmed, one’s a’self encounter –
In lonesome Place –

Ourself behind ourself, concealed –
Should startle most –
Assassin hid in our Apartment
Be Horror’s least.

The Body – borrows a Revolver –
He bolts the Door –
O’erlooking a superior spectre –
Or More –
—Emily Dickinson

I have tried to avoid excessive interpretation and reasoning to find a hiding place where the unconscious lurks. Creating the paintings for this exhibition has been a slow and drawn-out process – and rightly so. The subjec matters holds something from the past, something from the present and something from the future. It’s a matter of surrendering, of giving up but also receiving. In their freshness, the works are still partly a mystery to me. Intuition guides my work more and more, especially in the early stages. In the art creation process, I primarily focus on presence, honesty and courage.

Material costs for the exhibition have been covered by the Arts Promotion Centre of Finland.

Riikka Aihinen (b. 1976) is a painter from Turku. She graduated as a visual artist from the Lahti Institute of Fine Arts in 2004. Furthermore, she studied art at the Lahti Institute of Design (basic art teacher studies) in 2005-2006. During her career, she held several solo exhibitions and participated in group and joint exhibitions in Finland. Her latest solo exhibitions were at the Poriginal Gallery in Pori in 2023 and at the tm-gallery in Helsinki in 2022.

In her art, Aihinen examines her inner world of experience and thus structures her existence. She strives to identify emotions in the mind and body and their origins, and then convey them through her paintings. The works of recent years have dealt with duality in different ways. This can be seen in the distribution of the image surface and image pairs. Ideas arise from the interest in the relationship between mind and body, as well as the conflicts within the mind.