Emerging as a transformative force in the late 1980s, Uutinen emphasizes the importance of remaining grounded in the medium of painting while exploring new expressive methods that integrate actual philosophical and structural themes. This dual focus allows her works to evolve into meaningful dialogues that transcend simple representation.
In the early stages of her practice, Uutinen favored a seemingly abstract expression that contained ironic references to consumerism, including decorative elements and artificial palettes. During the 1990s, she was often perceived as a 'post-feminist' artist who provocatively subverted traditional modes of representation by using explicitly erotic, corporeal, and even vulgar signs in a way that challenged the conventions of abstract painting. This earned her the title of the Scandinavian 'bad girl' of contemporary art.
Marianna Uutinen is also known for her unique technique of peeling off thick layers of acrylic paint to shape three-dimensional organic forms on the canvas. These sculptural works can be experienced as active agencies that relentlessly recreate themselves as concrete three-dimensional images that extend into the surrounding space. The boundaries between form, metaphor and reality merge.
Since the 2000s, Uutinen has produced both roller-painted flat works on canvas, influenced by Warhol-esque aesthetics, and more textured works that evoke connotations of action painting.
Beginning in 2015, her work has evolved into 'shimmering' artworks characterized by minimalist surfaces of colour that shift in hue according to light and the movement of the viewer. Her 'skin-deep' abstract paintings invite us into scenic and meditative – almost spiritual – spaces that resonate with our immaterial existence. These temporally and spatially layered works offer an almost four-dimensional interactive experience reminiscent of virtual realities that foster immersive engagement.
Uutinen's 'glittering' artworks from 2018 onwards feature subtle figurative and erotic references that evoke a sense of cosmic corporeality, bridging the microcosm and macrocosm. Her work immerses us in the expansive realms of 'deep time' or big history' – concepts that highlight the vast interconnectedness of human existence with the long arc of the universe.
At the same time, Uutinen's art keeps us grounded in the everyday trivialities of life, reminding us of our ambivalent existence within the complexities of our contemporary 'mediated' realities and the wider universal timeline.
Marianna Uutinen’s work has been exhibited at Moderna Museet, Stockholm; Moderna Museet, Malmö; Malmö Konsthall; Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki; Kunsthalle Helsinki; EMMA - Espoo Museum of Modern Art, Espoo; Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Copenhagen; Living Art Museum, Reykjavik; Städtische Galerie Wolfsburg, Wolfsburg; Weserburg Museum of Modern Art, Bremen; and Ludwig Museum, Koblenz, among others.
Her works are in the permanent collection of Helsinki Art Museum; Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki; National Museum Stockholm; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Oslo; Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk; National Gallery of Iceland, Reykjavik; Buffalo AKG Art Museum, Buffalo; TIA Collection, Santa Fe; and the Seoul Museum of Art, among others. Public commissions include Nude for the Local Government Pensions Institution in Helsinki. In 1997 Marianna Uutinen represented Finland at the Venice Biennale and was awarded the Finland Prize for her distinguished artistic career in 2006. She served as a Professor of Painting at the Finnish Academy of Fine Arts in 2004–08.
Marianna Uutinen works with paintings which look like an unexpected and ecstatic meeting between an acid-bath of a Goya and the back curtain in a strip club. Her canvases are situated between transparency and confrontation, between surface and engagement. Here (in the words of Jon-Ove Steihaug) 'the impure, the vulgar and the overdone' meet and open up, more for the emotional than the intellectual; more for the concrete than the abstract. Her works are possessed of both erotic qualities and a blissed-out melancholy, of an alternately native, distracted and aggressive nature. Her approach wrestles with the wordless and the monumental which at the same time is subject to that certain banality stemming from spontaneous whim.
Uutinen's materials are the continuously self-renewing attitudes and codes of, equally, art, fashion, visual media, and everyday life. Through them, her production returns to the core of painting: questions about a painting's physical and conceptual materialism and about the state of a person viewing art […] Uutinen's art is associated with something much broader than just the emotional and the personal. It deals with our needs for images. A universally applicable level grows alongside the individual experience.”