Jenni Yppärilä

Since 2012 Yppärilä has concentrated on depicting built environment with her signature three-dimensional painting technique. Her technique blurs the line between painting and sculpture.

The buildings presented in her work are often common-looking places within their local environments. They are places that might seem mundane to the eye of a trespasser, such as bars and weathered corners of neighbourhood groceries, but they also have alternate functions as social gathering points for different kinds of communities. On the other hand, some of the places are already abandoned or about to be bulldozed.  These buildings are part of life soon to be forgotten.

Yppärilä’s interest to buildings is primarily sociological: buildings are an expression of lived history and the present moment, of the values and changes in society, and of the social environment of individuals. Detached from their contexts, buildings are no longer places of passage but objects that can be viewed as portraits of society and its members.

In her latest works, she has begun to reshape the authenticity of the building by drilling holes and cutting the walls into pieces, adding items that don’t really exist, or combining different facades together to get a more monumental and spatial approach. In these works, Yppärilä takes a more personal approach and expresses worrying agendas, such as the abuse of power, the exploitation of nature and people, and the endless demand to achieve and be more. She dresses these subjects subtly, sometimes with hidden clues that you really need to look closely to see.

She has works in collections such as the Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art (FI), the Tampere Art Museum (FI), the Oulu Art Museum (FI) and the Pori Art Museum (FI).

 

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