Born 1984 | Lives and works in Helsinki, Finland
In the paintings and ceramics of Helsinki–based artist Niina Villanueva, everything appears to be in a state of transformation. Enigmatic arrangements of abstracted human and animal figures intermingle with voluptuous arboreal and floral forms in shadowy, liminal spaces. The figures are fluid, often elongated or fragmented. They absorb, embrace, or encircle each other, as if participating in a shared inhale and exhale. Forms slip in and out of recognizability—a butterfly becomes a skull, a rib cage becomes a root structure, a nautilus, an intestine.
Villanueva works automatically, from a zone of presence. “The intuitive process is the foundation of my work;” she has explained. “The paintings tell, and I listen.” In her paintings, which typically comprise oil and raw pigment on canvas, she marries the ethereal qualities of color field painting with the numinous symbolism of surrealism. Stains of bodily and earthen hues—ochres, umbers, peach—serve as a hazy ground from which forms and figures emerge, often in bolder, more saturated tones of ultramarine, oxblood, burgundy, or cream. The resulting compositions gesture toward but ultimately resist symmetry, offering a complicated equilibrium. The worlds she depicts are often womblike—cavernous and aqueous. They summon complex feelings that seem rooted in the most fundamental relationship of parent and child, at once melancholic, tender, and vital.
Villanueva’s ceramic sculptures often evoke the dimensions of a bust, foregrounding the idea of the human body. Their surfaces, however, call to mind other organisms, featuring undulating accumulations of forms that recall coral, barnacles, fungi, pearls, stamen, and the trumpet-like volumes of foxglove flowers. Glazed in a palette mirroring that of her paintings, these works reflect on abundance, strangeness, and decay. Across her work, Villanueva reminds the viewer of the infinite metamorphosis of matter and our inextricability from nature.
