Hannaleena Heiska

Known for her alla prima paintings, velvety charcoal drawings, installations, performances and award-winning video works, Hannaleena Heiska’s work is characterized by a profound interest in the limits and liminality of humanity, especially in relation to other animals. She creates thematic wholes that transport their viewers into intense experiences of imagined worlds and other universes, often mirroring historical phenomena, our lived reality, and possible futures in fantastical ways. Heiska’s deep knowledge of the origins of her trade and materials is translated in her work as a unique air of timelessness – a hint to what might remain after us, or what possibly was before. 

Her colours derive their intensity both from their juxtapositions and from her way of using the whiteness of the chalk ground as a source of light, producing a kind of inner glow in the painting. Recurring universal shapes such as arcs, twists, and swirls run through her work, combined with colours that glow like bright stars.

Observatories formed a motif in Heiska’s earlier charcoal drawings. Working serially, she has also employed cinematic sci-fi imagery in her paintings to invoke reflections on human existence. Her latest paintings directs our gaze again towards the cosmos, while at the same time plumbing the depths of the human mind and consciousness – places that are in many respects unknown frontiers just like distant celestial bodies.

Her latest Celestial Question Mark exhibition at Helsinki Contemporary (13.9.-13.10.2024) took its name from a photo of a giant cosmic question mark captured by the James Webb telescope in 2023, which scientists believe to be a distant galaxy. In this exhibition, astronomy is one source of inspiration for Heiska, as are the photographs of electrical energy generated by the 19th century French astronomer Étienne Léopold Trouvelot.

One of Heiska’s new series of paintings is named after the classic theosophical treatise Thought-Forms (1901) by Annie Besant and Charles Webster Leadbeater, a book that has inspired many generations of artists in theorizing that ideas and emotions have shapes and colours. The paintings in Heiska’s Thought Forms series are more abstract than her other, previous work, enabling her to express ideas and feelings intuitively, freed of the constraints of the physical world. The paintings also invite the viewer to engage in a moment of introspection.

Today we have a vast amount of information readily available at our fingertips. In her essay Ognosia, the Polish Nobel laureate Olga Tokarczuk contemplates how this has, in fact, made our world smaller and more limited. Heiska for her part strives to visualize existence by painting the invisible phenomena that shape our daily reality, seeking the deeper connections and meanings between them.
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Hannaleena Heiska (b. 1973, Oulu) graduated from the Department of Painting at the Finnish Academy of Fine Arts in 2006. She was a nominee for the biggest art prize in Finland, the Ars Fennica, in 2011. Heiska’s solo exhibitions have been seen at Turku Art Museum in 2019, and at Gothenburg Art Museum in 2015. She has also exhibited internationally, for example, at the 4th Ural Industrial Biennial, Yekaterinburg, Russia, 2017; Espace Louis Vuitton Gallery, Tokyo 2012; and the CAC – Contemporary Art Centre, Vilnius, Lithuania 2010. Heiska’s works are represented in many significant public collections, such as Gothenburg Museum of Art, Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma, Helsinki, and EMMA – Espoo Museum of Modern Art. Her videoworks have been shown at numerous film and media-art festivals in Europe. Her film Today We Livewon first prize in the Helsinki Short Film Festival in 2013.