Heikki Marila: Flower Paintings
"I've always tried to use existing forms as it gives me the freedom to explore the essence of a painting."
Heikki Marila (b. 1966, Lahti, Finland) is regarded as one of the most important Finnish painters of his generation. He studied at the Turku School of Fine Arts and won the prestigious Carnegie Art Award in 2012; a recognition that marked his international breakthrough. His work is held in major collections, including the Sara Hildén Art Museum in Tampere, which in 2025 dedicated a major retrospective to his thirty-year oeuvre.
Marila's paintings are monumental in scale and charged with a physical, almost sculptural materiality: thick, relief-like layers of oil paint that seem to lift off the canvas. His work constantly moves between opposites: the sublime and the repulsive, the spiritual and the corporeal, figuration and abstraction.
Within this body of work, the flower still lifes form one of the most beloved and recognizable series. Marila draws on the tradition of the 17th-century Dutch still life, particularly the work of Willem Claesz Heda and Abraham van Beyeren, but wrests the motif from its sheltered, domestic context and blows it up to an overwhelming, almost explosive scale. Petals become thickly applied, sculptural forms that appear to detach from the surface and scatter across the canvas like confetti; what begins as a classical bouquet ends in a lush, sometimes chaotic composition suspended between bloom and decay, beauty and transience. This combination of historical reference and radically contemporary, physical painting resulted in the publication "Kukkia ja perkeleitä" (Flowers and Devils, 2014), the title under which his flower work became internationally known.
With this flower series, Marila affirms his position as a painter who takes the tradition of Western painting seriously while radically making it his own: rooted in art-historical iconography, yet transformed into a sensory, monumental form of painting that is as much about transience and physicality as it is about flowers.
Marila is represented internationally by Galerie Forsblom in Helsinki, one of Finland's major, well-known galleries, which already presented a solo exhibition of his work in 2017. In the Netherlands he is represented by MPV Gallery in Oisterwijk, which has shown his work for several years - including at previous editions of PAN Amsterdam and Art Rotterdam. On 27 September, a solo exhibition of Marila's work opens at MPV Gallery, and this year the gallery will also bring his work to PAN Amsterdam.
