Artists

Rauha Mäkilä

Photo: Juliana Harkki

Rauha Mäkilä is known for her brightly coloured paintings depicting everyday occurrences, drawing from both popular culture and the artist’s own life and family. Her works, often featuring children, reveal the profound sincerity of their subjects, and an unreserved glorification of the joy of being young. In recent years, Mäkilä has also reflected on her own position and work as an artist. Although a whole range of new types of spatial compositions have opened up in the paintings, Mäkilä’s main concern is still colour. In describing the progress of painting and her world of colour, she says: “My starting point is colour and how certain colours can support each other and build tension on the canvas. I test how I can build an interesting whole out of colours and what happens when I introduce new colours into my familiar and safe palette.”


Rauha Mäkilä
(b. 1980) is a Helsinki-based artist who graduated from the Finnish Academy of Fine Arts in 2007. Mäkilä’s works have been exhibited in numerous solo and group exhibitions in Finland and internationally, including the Chart Art Fair, Copenhagen, Denmark; Gallery Susanne Pettersson, Stockholm, Sweden; the Munch Gallery, New York, US; Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, US; EMMA – Espoo Museum of Modern Art, Espoo, Finland; Landskrona Museum, Landskrona, Sweden, Galleri Thomassen, Gothenburg, Sweden and Aboa Vetus Ars Nova Museum, Turku, Finland. Her works are included in several major collections, including those of the City of Gothenburg, HAM Helsinki Art Museum, Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma, Saastamoinen Foundation, Jenny and Antti Wihuri Foundation and the Niemistö Collection. Mäkilä’s latest solo exhibition at Helsinki Contemporary, TARA, was in 2023. In 2015, Mäkilä was head of the jury for the Young Artists exhibition at Kunsthalle Helsinki.

Exhibitions

1.12.-22.12.2023
18.5.-2.7.2023
9.9.-9.10.2022
7.7.-31.7.2021
28.8.-30.8.2020
7.8.-30.8.2020
9.3.-31.3.2018
9.12.-17.12.2017
3.6.-3.7.2016
4.9.-27.9.2015
CV

Works