FLESH – Jarmo Mäkilä
01 May 2026 – 18 July 2026
Gallery space on the ground floorVisits and guided tours are possible every Saturday between 12 and 6 pm.
The Inner Landscapes of Jarmo Mäkilä
“A painting is not what you see, but what it evokes in you and what lies behind it. In a way, a person lives two lives: an external one and an internal one. One is hidden and the other is visible. I try to grasp that hidden life.”
– Jarmo Mäkilä
The paintings of Jarmo Mäkilä (b. 1952) are inner landscapes. They are materially situated intimeless in-between spaces, on the borders between the inner and the outer, or between the real and the imagined.
Although Mäkilä’s visual language is realistic, even highly detailed, the events he depicts are far removed from everyday reality. His paintings are metaphorical worlds that contain all aspects of his identity and memories—from a small child to the threshold of adulthood—as well as all alternative presents and possible futures.
Jarmo Mäkilä is one of the most significant figures in Finnish visual art. He is an independent pathfinder who made his breakthrough in the 1970s and rose to the forefront of Finnish postmodernism in the 1980s. In recent decades, he has explored first his childhood and youth, and later what it means to be a man. He has done so in a way where the subjective experiences of the individual expand into something universally recognizable.
The movement from the private to the shared is also present in Mäkilä’s exhibition FLESH. At the same time, he approaches the theme of masculinity from a new perspective for himself.
The films Sleep (1964) and Flesh (1968) by Andy Warhol, which Mäkilä saw in his youth, left in his mind an experience of a quiet, almost merciless state of viewing. In this state, duration turns the gaze inward: the viewer becomes an observer, and the observer becomes an experiencer. It is from within this state that Mäkilä paints. The viewer is invited to look, to experience, and to rediscover the human being.
Timo Valjakka