Mika Vesalahti

Throughout his artistic career, Mika Vesalahti has tried to express the drama of being human. The Fine Art Academy of Finland’s educated and widely exhibited artist has evolved recognizably idiosyncratic forms to illustrate even the painful schematic and conceptual contents. The artist invites his audiences to face controversial themes and questions. Vesalahti’s work of art is overlapped with the history of art and gets its driving force from it. The artist combines art historical ingredients with contemporary social criticism. He unifies different philosophical and literary models in a body of artwork. 

The artist deals with politically contradictory subjects: the struggle for power and violence, climate change – the crises of our time. Vesalahti has stylistically come a long way from presentational painting to his current “hybrid” style, which combines different ways of painting expression: expressionistic, mythological, and classical colour toning. In his latest series of paintings, Vesalahti explores the possibilities of composition and texture. Through raw expression, he researches the violent tensions of our time and the experience of threats. But simultaneously, he liberates painting as its own language, experimentation, and freedom. 

As an artist who lives and works in two countries, Finland and Estonia, internationality has become a natural factor in his activity as an artist. He has worked in residencies in Italy, Germany, and other European countries. Numerous private and group exhibitions abroad have meant adopting cultural influences from these places and cities. Mika Vesalahti also works by writing and publishing essays exploring the cultural roots of Europeanness, calling this study critical aesthetics.