I’m thrilled to share that I’ve been awarded the Fine Arts Academy of Finland Foundation Prize, alongside my fellow artists Axel Straschnoy, Johanna Lonka ja Bita Razavi.
In 2013, the Fine Arts Academy of Finland launched an art prize called The Fine Arts Academy of Finland Prize. The prize is awarded to an active Finnish visual artist who has not yet received a financially significant art prize and whose work is deemed internationally interesting.
The prize is awarded in collaboration with EMMA (Espoo Museum of Modern Art) and the City of Espoo.
“All the awarded artists create spatial works that incorporate a variety of artistic methods. However, each artist’s approach and expression are distinct. Axel Straschnoy explores scientific phenomena and human-developed theories, transforming them into artistic experiences. Bita Razavi assumes the role of an observer, examining human actions, desires, and speech, as well as the emotions, contradictions, and resolutions they generate. Johanna Lonka delves into the ways different species adapt to and can adapt to a changing environment and a disappearing natural world – at times reversing the relationships between species. Kaija Hinkula, in turn, works playfully within the expanded field of painting, encouraging viewers to engage their imagination,
dream, and envision a better future. The prize winners are in an excellent creative phase, and their work is topical as well as internationally relevant.”
Read more ( in Finnish) :
Essay about my practice by Tarja Pitkänen-Walter:
Painting as a Scene that Shapes the World
— on Kaija Hinkula’s Art
Text: Tarja Pitkänen-Walter 2/2025
Fine Arts Academy of Finland Foundation Prize
“I think of the Gardener installation as a metaphor for nurturing and feeding dreams. References to the gardener’s chores, such as caring for imaginary plants and seeds, are a metaphor for the human capacity for imagining a new world. The potential of seedlings and bright fantastical colors symbolize the processes of growing and change, creating a new world and ideas.” (Kaija Hinkula on her exhibition Gardener in 2024)
Understanding the great forces of dreaming and imagination are central to Kaija Hinkula’s artistic process. Rather than escapism, she is concerned with awareness of the mutability of reality and challenging this. The artist’s studio and work are a safe haven and a growing place for freedom, living differently, and new points of view. It is especially comforting now that the world is rather topsy-turvy. Hinkula’s fresh gifts to the world take shape there.
Her works are based on the central elements of painting: colour and composition. However, they are not limited to a traditional, flat format. Of course, the works mostly consist of painted or otherwise coloured surfaces, but also of three-dimensional shapes and ready-made objects. The colours especially lead the exhibition space to merge with the works. Some of Hinkula’s works involve moving images, light, and even performance. The use of light and moving images creates a fresh interpretation of painting as a medium. She talks about crossing the borders of painting and fusing different art forms in moving processes.
Hinkula’s works raise questions and make statements on the expanded potential of painting. First of all, why should a painting be limited to the wall? Hinkula’s Master of Fine Arts thesis project in 2021 did not look like a painting torn down from a wall but rather like the wall was bent and blended with the painting. The painting’s elements also escaped their habitual places in her earlier works in the Builder exhibition of 2019. A yellow rectangle ran down the wall and half onto the floor at a sharp angle and aniline spray paint staggered up to the ceiling and turned into a vaporous line. An upside-down box with something resembling a trickle of red paint hanging out of it was placed on the room divider. It was as if Hinkula had turned the rectangular canvas upside down and allowed the contents to run and trickle into the space. She was shaking the abstract geometric minimalism of the modernist tradition into a new shape, an unrestrained and free independence, towards a ‘fantastical minimalism’ as she herself defines her current work.
The names of Hinkula’s exhibitions evoke painting as a verb, an action:
Builder (2019), Play (2022), Stargazer (2023), and Gardener (2024). An important pointer is also Democracy (2024), a public installation for the Oulu City Hall. In the site-specific painting installation in the lobby of the city council, the central elements of decision-making, the Finnish words JAA and EI, as well as the president’s mallet, are interpreted in two- and three-dimensional assemblages of colours, forms, spatial compositions, and textures. The viewer recognises the multi-sensory representation of the elements of power, absolute in themselves, as human and humoristic, and their weight seems fickle. The ‘aesthetic activism’ of the installation freshens up the public image of the city hall.
In Hinkula’s work shifting places, observations, or materials out of context and changing them into new shapes, spaces, or actions is central. For example, in her video performance Baking for my Lover (2023) the colourful stress balls turn into swelling and bubbling dough in the artist’s more or less gentle hands, commenting on the nature of the relationship. Meanwhile, the nature of painting is freed from the expectation of a fixed object and the requirement of paint applied with a brush. It wears different materials, merges with day to day life, societal institutions and colours, and changes their nature as well as that of the art. In taking a step forward and into the future, by redefining painting, Hinkula’s works are also related to the functions of painting from hundreds and thousands of years ago, breaking the restrictions of the canvas, and to the everyday decorative painting of walls — the need to uplift and entertain, to make the power of visual pleasure a part of environment and life.
Kaija Hinkula studied art at the Liminka Art School and the South Karelia University of Applied Sciences. She graduated as a Master of Fine Arts from the Academy of Fine Arts in Helsinki in 2021.
In her earlier work, the painterly gestures often turned and twisted the basic geometric forms and searched for their place in the space. In recent years, they have blossomed into a rich and distinctive flower. In her exhibitions Stargazer and Gardener, the layering of paint typical to traditional painting is reconstructed as concrete boards with holes in them, through which different things peer, hang, pour, drop, and even claw. These wild yet upright paintings step out of their frames and open up as the colour on the wall behind them and onto the floor as assemblages of objects; a scene. The paintings become cheerful situations and temptingly straightforward agents that call the viewer to join them: Play with me!
Usually, as we grow up, we lose play and the spontaneous interpretation and understanding of reality. Kaija Hinkula’s playfulness enlivens the viewer.
This is painting as a practical site for shaping reality par excellence!