HIPPOLYTE STUDIO
Kalevankatu 18 B, 00100 Helsinki, Finland

+358 9 612 33 44, www.hippolyte.fi/studio
Open: Tue-Fri 12:00-17:00, Sat-Sun 12:00-16:00

Kaija Mäenpää
For My Sister
Photographs and table works from 1992
3.4.–26.4. 2009

Kaija Mäenpää will read her poems from the collection "Kuvat vaeltavat" from 1994–2002 at Hippolyte Studio on Saturday, 25 April 2009, from 3pm.

This exhibition consists of retrospective photographs and table works that feature my sister Elina (1957–1993). The photos represent a concrete merging of two temporal levels: facial photographs from 1992 and 1982 printed in superimposition. The prints were made in 1992. Only a few of the photos presented separately here were exhibited in 1995 as part of the series To a Young Woman Who Is Dead. The photo tables were exhibited in 1993 when they were presented in dialogue with paintings hung on the wall. This gesture of combining pictures and time levels was characteristic of my paintings in 1990–93. The photographs were usually self-portraits, with 2–3 negatives printed over one another, and I used them as parts in a painting or a painting installation. My aim was to incorporate human vulnerability and a person's movement in space into paintings in a more concrete way.

In the photographs, my sister tells about her life in a situation when her cancer had already spread (in 1992). She regarded my idea of photographing her as natural, and felt that interaction and an open attitude were important. Taking photos and printing them was a conscious way for me to try to fathom how the immateriality of life, the broadness of our awareness and inner strength come to the fore in difficult life situations. I have altered the pictures by printing several negatives on top of each other, and I have also used a picture of my own hand in the multiple prints. Superimposition is for me a way to bring internality into the pictures. Some ten years previously I had photographed my sister's face at home through a pane of glass after I had had a dream that showed vulnerability very starkly.

On top of the painted tables, the photographs seem distanced. They are part of the time that gathers round this table: past, present, future. Another thing that has come to the table (and almost certainly was also in the shooting situation) is the absence and memory of our brother, his death from cancer as a child, and – looking forward from the time that the table was created – my own spell of cancer (1997–98). In this future that is now past, even absence becomes presence, and also present is the memory of how the way my sister lived and faced her illness helped me to recover from mine.

The table in the table work is based on my kitchen table. A table is the place where writing, the marks of life, is created. The stages of writing appear on the surface of the table and in the sheets of paper (that are folded and given page numbers with the idea of binding them into a book). A table is a place of life and of mark-making. The question that the ochre-coloured table asks has to do with naming. The writing on the sheets runs as follows: "What are the meanings of that which we call happiness?"

KAIJA Johanna MÄENPÄÄ (born 1960 in Helsinki, lives and works in Helsinki) studied at the Finnish Academy of Fine Arts in the Department of Painting from 1985–90 and 1996–98 (MA studies). She has held solo exhibitions since 1991, mostly in Helsinki (incl. Galleria Katariina 1991 and the gallery of the Finnish Painters' Union 2004) and has participated in joint and group exhibitions in Finland and abroad. She worked as a contracted teacher of art in the Department of Architecture at the Helsinki University of Technology from 1993–2001.

Ever since her degree show at the Finnish Academy of Fine Arts (1989) her paintings have included hinged flaps that can be opened and closed, like doors or the pages of a book. The space in her paintings is both three-dimensional and expressive of the layers of the mind. One typical feature of her paintings is the spatial interlacing of images and language. In 1990–93 she incorporated photographs taken in different times into her paintings.

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For more information, please contact:
Marja Kosunen/Photographic Gallery Hippolyte +358 9- 612 33 44, info@hippolyte.fi

Above: Kaija Mäenpää, From the series For My Sister, 1992, 21x15cm.
Below: Kaija Mäenpää,Starting Point (Before This, Now, After This), 1992, 75x100x70cm