Galerie Anhava
Helsinki
Galerie Anhava focuses on contemporary Finnish and Nordic art, playing an active role in the international art world.
The gallery was founded in 1991 by Ilona Anhava and merged with Galerie Artek in 1997. The gallery’s exhibition program encompasses all forms of contemporary visual art, from painting and sculpture to photography, video and installation, with special emphasis on conceptual art. Galerie Anhava is committed to the long-term representation of its emerging, mid-career and more established artists with the aim of being part of a dialogue between artists, institutions and audience. Since the late 1990s the gallery has actively taken part in international art fairs.
Featured artists
Essi Kuokkanen
For Market 2024 Galerie Anhava is excited to bring a solo presentation of Essi Kuokkanen. Kuokkanen’s paintings speak of sensitivity, introspection and sympathy, giving form to unspoken yet vivid thoughts and feelings that hover on the borderline of sleep.
Beneath the sometimes humorous surface lies solemnity and depth. Everything is connected, boundaries between species become fluid, the inanimate becomes alive and living creatures break apart. Kuokkanen is interested in the physicality of emotion – how events in the mind create a physical reaction in the body.
The figures in her paintings and drawings are like reservoirs filled with feeling, occasionally spilling, oozing or overflowing uncontrollably. Determined, mischievous and sensitive, Kuokkanen’s shrewd brush investigates and illustrates the contradictions, hypocrisies and distortions of our world, and humankind.
Essi Kuokkanen (b. 1991) lives and works in Helsinki, Finland. Kuokkanen has shown her work in several solo and group exhibitions, most recently at Turku Art Museum. She has works in numerous major Finnish collections, including the Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art and EMMA Espoo Museum of Modern Art, as well as in many private collections in Finland, Sweden and Denmark. In 2019 Kuokkanen received the Finnish Art Society’s Ducat Prize.
Essi Kuokkanen, Artist in her studio. Courtesy of the gallery and the artist.
Essi Kuokkanen, 'For You I Will Give My Everything', (2022). Oil on canvas, 168 x 140 cm. Photo Eetu Huhtala.
Essi Kuokkanen, 'Hiding in Plain Sight' (2023). Oil on canvas, 75 x 75 cm. Photo Eetu Huhtala.
