Niina Villanueva works through intuitive space and experience. Colour plays a central role: her works often begin with large fields of colour which she prepares herself from raw pigments. Through painting, she seeks rhythm, and the work develops on an abstract level towards its final expression.
Villanueva approaches her work as an outsider, surrendering to the guidance of the image. The artwork does not submit to force but functions as a metaphor for free movement and for a world in which the artist is only one part of the event. Within the work, its own laws and egalitarian hierarchies prevail, and every element participates equally in the formation of the whole. Villanueva plays with art-historical themes drawn from the ideal of Belvedere gardens – a controlled, geometrically structured landscape. The basis is a rupture within a Belvedere garden from which animals and plants are able to escape, either into freedom or into another reality; the initial setting begins to fracture. The controlled landscape no longer holds but ruptures, gaps and passages emerge. The living does not remain in its assigned place, as it begins to move, flee, and transform. The garden is no longer merely an object of the gaze; it becomes a site of events in which the anthropocentric perspective falters and nature reclaims space or opens towards something else, the unknown. Over time, human-made monuments also lose their meaning. They detach from their original context, sink to the seafloor and disappear from view. When human-made order collapses, nature does not fill the void as before but happens anew.
In Villanueva’s works, this process unfolds as a space where anthropocentric history recedes and the living continues without the human gaze. Dualities begin to dissolve; the layered becomes whole. Through vortices and movement, the continuity of forms creates a softness that feels genuine and purposeful. Nature does not return to an original state: it generates something else – layered, strange and alive. Disintegration does not appear as an end but as a transition in which death and birth are intertwined.
Villanueva’s works have been exhibited e.g. at Heinola Art Museum, Brinkhall Manor, Turku, and Kunsthalle Helsinki. Her works are included in the collections of, among others, the Finnish National Gallery, the Saastamoinen Foundation / EMMA – Espoo Museum of Modern Art, and the Finnish Art Society, as well as in private collections in Finland, Switzerland, France, and the United States.
