view press release
Uutinen’s paintings oscillate between desire and repulsion, and we might perhaps say that by allowing painting towards sculpture, she has turned inside out traditional questions about where the picture space should be, so as to establish a passage, a zone, that allows her freedom of action.
view full text
» I create a performative space that people can project onto. «
view full article
She explores the various artistic levels of “camp” by taking it to a nearly excruciating level with tacky colors and plasticky materials. As early as 1964, theorist Susan Sonntag explained in her essay “Notes on Camp,” how this dimension of Kitsch can weave a web of meanings as well as constitute a play with symbols, challenging conventional approaches to perception. In the same manner, Uutinen provokes the viewer with the illusory materiality of her works. Although they appear to consist of scrunched-up pieces of silver foil, they are actually made up of numerous layers of paint.
view press release (Anselm Reyle + Marianna Uutinen: Last Supper, Berlin 2013)
I see possibilities in the shifting and relocating paradigms of painting. Most of all, this concerns the context of painting vis-à-vis the application of certain types of painterly gestures and fast and direct observations. Or, to put it in other terms, a certain type of fictionality within painting. This might sound like some kind of Disney-like version of painting, but seriously speaking, I am suggesting notions of directness and presence in painting. This presence is not about some 3-D figure, but about a certain type of fictionality which painting allows to come into existence.
view full interview
Marianna Uutinens works deal with the fundamental discrepancy between norm or language and what is to be represented. She utilizes the low, the marginalized, the excluded, and transports its technique of expression to the "wrong" place, directly into the very centre of the established and norm- making institution. She can crochet with acrylic colours, or place macrame works on banal objects, and she does it with such a superb mastering of surface and scale that it is impossible to question the work. But she does not do this only as a dare. It is not a change of roles or a reevaluation of the marginalized or a discussion of how values are constructed, that is of primary interest in Marianna Uutinen's artistic projects. Her work is asocial in the actual meaning of the word.
The asocial is located in the body, the senses of which, with the exception of eyesight and hearing, seem to resist domestication. How does the sense of touch make sense of the world? Or the sense of smell. Or taste? They cannot be utilized as symbolization or code. They operate without language, and thus cannot be used as transcendency or expiation. They start from the body, reach another body, return to the body.
They cannot be understood, they can only be experienced.
New approaches to storytelling and figuration emerge in Uutinen’s Bathroom Stories and their glittering abstract surfaces evoke countless fleeting memories. The philosopher Jane Bennett describes a life as “a restless activeness, a destructive-creative force-presence that does not coincide fully with any specific body.” The non-linear narratives that Uutinen creates in her works emerge from a force field-like space that ensues from her dialogue with materials—and materials’ dialogue with her.
view press release (Marianna Uutinen: Bathroom Stories, Berlin 2020)
People have always looked up at the sky. Anticipated seasonal changes, unpredictable weather and flooding that nourishes fields. They have bowed to planets moved by divine forces and the light of ancient stars. Shot strange devices up into the sky, in order to momentarily transcend the limitations of gravity and of the human body.
The paintings of Marianna Uutinen present a dizzying dance of energy and matter in an intimate and cosmic voltage space. The materiality of the works grows from the same source as the universe, is essentially a part of it. At this level, the significance of Uutinen's works seems to focus primarily on what painting factually is: materiality and its endless metamorphosis.
view press release (Marianna Uutinen: Trashy Cosmos, Stockholm 2022)
In Uutinen’s work, the composition unfolds like a thin skin stretching out over the canvas. Explosions of color on large-format canvases which confront and take hold of the viewer. Discos, flashlights, neon and glamour are perhaps what comes into people’s minds when they look at her pictures. The physical presence of her work is reinforced by their size and structure.
view press release (Marianna Uutinen: I am Painting, Berlin, 2013)
Beauty is often experienced as a trap by contemporary artists. Despite the interest in beauty shown in contemporary American painting, European art seems to be suspicious of its value and sceptical of its definitions. And what kind of beauty: the kind that is supported by institutions which is so fragile that it can only live under these protected circumstances or the kind of beauty that has 'street credibility'. It seems that it is somewhere between these concepts, or ideas, or experiences of beauty that Marianna Uutinen's search is presently taking place. It is a serious search that does not shun experimenting with the most banal, the most obvious and the already used to find out whether there is still space for freedom and personal expression.
This search is strong in its pliancy and unforgiving in its sensitivity. Its most deceptive character, however, is its ability to mislead us, to play hide and seek with the seriousness of her project, to camouflage the cues in a way that requires sharp observation which, when failing, often reveals our own insensitivity and shallowness.
While searching, one's power of observation is at its sharpest. I think it is at this vulnerable and fertile phase where Marianna Uutinen's art is at present. And she is missing painting.
view full text