Born in 1989 | Lives and works in Helsinki, Finland
Juliana Hyrri’s work is charged with the contradictions of presence and absence, poignancy and tenderness. Her imagery leads gently into eternal breakfasts, gossip magazines, inedible fruits, and love triangles. Figures, objects, and spaces disintegrate, blend, and reassemble, creating a shifting world where meaning is always in motion.
Her process often begins with blurred sketches, memories, and references to art history, evolving through observations, notes, and tactile encounters with the everyday. With a background in contemporary comics, Hyrri merges visual art and narrative, exploring the relationship between writing and painting. Her titles are works in themselves, miniature texts that expand and complement the exhibition's narrative arc.
In her recent exhibition at the Orimattila Art Museum, the work was shaped by increasing light of spring and the dust it reveals. She reflected on house dust as composed partly of skin cells, imagining the human body disintegrating over winter and taking quiet ownership of space. This sense of ongoing transformation runs through her body of work, where recurring motifs, spaces, figures, objects, form a loose but intimate visual language. Her use of irony adds complexity: even when the themes lean toward solitude or melancholy, they are often softened by humor and warmth.
Hyrri was awarded the State Prize by the National Council for Multidisciplinary Art and the Critics’ Spurs Award by the Finnish Critics’ Association for her debut graphic novel. She holds an MFA from the Academy of Fine Arts Helsinki (2023) and a master’s in visual narrative from Aalto University School of Arts, Design and Architecture (2020). Her works are included in notable collections such as the Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma, Tampere Art Museum, Savonlinna Art Museum, Ylöjärvi city, Basware, Aine Art Foundation, Nelimarkka Fund, Aalto University, Lähitapiola, Kangasala city and HUS.
