Camilla Vuorenmaa

In her practice, Camilla Vuorenmaa challenges the physical and traditional boundaries of painting. Her carved wood paintings are hybrids of sculpture and painting that require time and physical strength to create. The style is rough and unvarnished, endowed with a playful decorativeness. Some of the reliefs are like partitions; others feature elements of wall painting, a medium the artist likes for its immediacy, momentariness, and spatiality.

Vuorenmaa depicts people and humanity in her work. She searches for motifs in magazines and books and takes photographs of different groups of people who are bound to each other by a profession, beliefs, hobby, or just situation. In her working process, facing fundamental questions by meeting and observing her subjects in authentic situations has become increasingly important. Besides these motifs, movies have always been one inspiring theme behind her works. Lately, she has been working more directly with the themes around her childhood heroes in films, like the characters of Princess Leia (Star Wars) and Ellen Ripley (Alien Saga).

Camilla Vuorenmaa graduated from the Department of Painting at the Finnish Academy of Fine Arts in 2005. She lives and works in Helsinki, Finland. Her works have been exhibited widely in Finland and other northern countries, both solo and in group shows. In 2017 Vuorenmaa was nominated for Finland’s most significant art price Ars Fennica, among four other nominees. Vuorenmaa received the Finnish Academy of Fine Arts Prize in the spring of 2015, after which her solo exhibition was shown at EMMA – Espoo Museum of Modern Art in the spring of 2016. In 2018, Vuorenmaa was awarded a William Thuring Prize. Vuorenmaa also won a prize for her wooden works in the International Solo Awards 2013 at the Spring exhibition at Kunsthal Charlottenborg in Copenhagen.

Vuorenmaa’s works are found in collections such as the Gothenburg Museum of Art, Saastamoinen Foundation, EMMA – Espoo Museum of Modern Art, Amos Anderson Art Museum, Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art, Tiftö Foundation and Niemistö Collection.

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