Petri Hytönen

Petri Hytönen captures dreams and fantasies in his watercolours and mixed media-based paintings. As a storyteller, he uses a lot of unconscious and surrounding reality hand in hand. His inspiration comes from domestic life and studious traveling abroad. As material, he uses cooperation with various operators in the wide field of culture—and of course, photos, sketches, films, music, and strip cartoons. And also, in Hytönen’s pictorial idiom, humour mingles with gravity and joy with sorrow. And not to forget the other forms of gravity, such as the desire to fly, levitate, and float.

In his visual world, fantasy and dreams often meet other kinds of worlds. Worlds of different perceptions, sometimes simultaneously, sometimes alone. There is something magical, joyful, and melancholic in Hytönen’s creations. In recent years, the material and physical processes have become a significant part of the painting processes – thanks to activity in artist group work. Hytönen also makes use of a special spraying technique, enabling him to obtain soft and sensitive results on paper.

Petri Hytönen lives and works in Porvoo. He graduated with an MFA from the Academy of Fine Arts, Helsinki, in 1988 and worked there as a lecturer in painting from 2009-2014. He is a founding member of the Joymen artist group, Drawing Theatre, Porvoo Triennial, and Galleria Rankka. In 2000, he received the Carnegie Art Award’s Third Prize. He has had numerous solo exhibitions and has taken part in group exhibitions in Finland and abroad. His work is represented in collections including EMMA, Gothenburg Museum of Art, Helsinki Art Museum, Malmö Art Museum, Nordic Watercolour Museum, Saastamoinen Foundation Art Collection, Finnish National Gallery – Kiasma, Pro Artibus Foundation, Uppsala Art Museum and the Wihuri Art Collection

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