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, 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 is actively involved in the international contemporary art scene. In 2025, her works are featured in exhibitions at the Kuopio Art Museum, Orimattila Art Museum, Culture House Laikku and Tikanoja Art Museum, among others. In addition, she has published two acclaimed and award-winning contemporary graphic novels, with a third forthcoming from WSOY in autumn 2025.
Hyrri 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 several notable collections such as the Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma, Tampere Art Museum, Savonlinna Art Museum, Aine Art Foundation, HUS, The cities of Kangasala and Ylöjärvi, LähiTapiola, Aalto University, Basware and Nelimarkka Fund, as well as numerous private collections.
