Tiina Pyykkinen’s practice focuses on the exploration of bodily memory, non-verbal communication and the experience of temporality. She approaches these themes through e.g. philosophy of mind, neuroscience, and psychology, with a particular interest in how distortions of time and space are formed, and how emotions can be understood as embodied, spatial and relational phenomena.
In Pyykkinen’s work, affective experiences are not merely internal states but become integrated into memory systems and shape ways of relating to the surrounding environment. Her practice addresses these questions through the concept of visual disturbance; a bodily perceptual condition in which temporal continuity is interrupted, fragmented, or slowed. The paintings consist of multiple transparent pictorial layers applied onto mirrored metal surfaces. Materiality is central in Pyykkinen’s practice. The layered surfaces function like skin-like membranes that both conceal and reveal, through which the viewer perceives a shifting and blurred reflection of themselves. The image of the self does not appear unified or stable but emerges as fragmented and relational. Optical phenomena and pictorial structures disrupt habitual modes of seeing, shifting perception away from interpretation toward embodied experience. Pyykkinen’s visual language is defined by continuous movement. Through this material configuration the viewer simultaneously encounters several perceptual levels: the layered structure of the painting, their own reflection and the shifting reflections of their surroundings.
The simultaneous perception of these visual layers is physiologically impossible, forcing the viewer to make a choice in how to direct their attention. This choice inevitably causes other layers to recede or blur, positioning the viewer as an active participant who both produces and disrupts their own perception. This forms the basis for Pyykkinen’s works, examining states of presence disorder and communicative rupture as relational conditions. The works place the viewer in a situation where presence and absence are experienced simultaneously. Rather than excluding one another, these states define each other. The image is in a constant state of change and never resolves into a fixed whole. Instead, the work unfolds gradually, and meaning emerges in a transient encounter between viewer and artwork.
Pyykkinen has graduated from the Finnish Academy of Fine Arts in Helsinki, and studied also at e.g. Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst (Academy of Fine Arts) in Leipzig. Her works have been exhibited in e.g. Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki, Rovaniemi Art Museum, Tampere Art Museum, Serlachius Museum, Mänttä, and Bury Art Museum and Sculpture Centre in Manchester. Pyykkinen’s works are in the collections of the Finnish National Gallery, the Finnish State, the Paulo Foundation, The Foundation of Päivi and Paavo Lipponen, Serlachius Museum and Saastamoinen Art Foundation / EMMA – Espoo Museum of Modern Art, among others.
