TEEMU KORPELAWhen You Are Thinking, You Are Actually Listening 24.5.2025 – 15.6.2025
World of Ideas, 2025pigment and acrylic on canvas
50 x 60 cm
At the core of my work is a desire to examine phenomena and forces that affect the way I see my life and the world. The deeper I dig into this exploration, the more aware I become of the presence of a vast number of causal relationships and their layered nature. They overwhelm me so as to render elusive a logical understanding of the structure of reality and how it is experienced.
What has become clear is that the way I see and experience the world is guided not only by my personal history but also the history of humankind. Freud compared the human mind to the city of Rome, an ancient and layered place where ruins and relics from past eras coexist. We are the last domino in a long chain; who knows from where our values, ideas and traumas really originate?
If the human mind is like an ancient city,
my artistic duty is to explore its ruins, cellars and attics and record what I
see in my paintings. Upon leaving the reality of my mind and entering this shared
world, the visions and objects I have seen often become unrecognisable even to me.
But to understand the abstraction, you have to start disentangling it. My
paintings make up an archive of imaginary and hypothetical documents, which
may, one day, help me to understand what all this is about.
Teemu Korpela
Visual artist Teemu Korpela (b.1980) graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts with a Master of Fine Arts degree in 2016. In addition, he has studied a wide range of painting techniques in Finland and abroad. Korpela says that his expression and its development have been guided by reflection on what the different expressions in painting tell us about us as persons and what kind of feelings and insights paintings can communicate to viewers. Teemu Korpela has held solo exhibitions and participated in several group and joint exhibitions since 2005. Korpela has received grants from the Leena Luostarinen Memorial Fund and the Anita Snellman Foundation (2014). Korpela's works feature in several Finnish public collections, such as those of the Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma (the Finnish National Gallery), the Jenny and Antti Wihuri Foundation, the Tampere Art Museum and the Finnish State Art Commission.
