This summer, Teckningsmuseet will showcase the contemporary international artists Maria Bajt from Sweden, based in Berlin, and Hannaleena Heiska from Finland. With strong expressions and great sensitivity, their drawings and sculptures addresses themes such as the human being, surveillance, mythology, and archaeology.
Maria Bajt
Maria Bajt works with painting, drawing, sculpture, graphics, installations, public art, and artist books, in various materials such as paper, textiles, glass, and steel. She often creates entire room installations where drawing and painting extend into the space and become part of a larger narrative. She works in various formats, from small graphic prints to large site-specific installations.
Like the surrealists, Bajt is interested in artistic play as a method of creation, where dreams and the subconscious can come to the forefront. She combines this intuitive approach with research and collected materials. Based on this, she creates a multitude of paper silhouettes that she combines into hybrid figures or bodies that become the groundwork for her work.
Bajt works with drawing in both strong colours and graphic black-and-white imagery. In her art, she highlights women’s lives and experiences in mythology, history, and the present day. She works with historical and archaeological references, personal experiences, and the state of the world. In Bajt’s art, we are reminded that all creation involves transformation – one embodiment leads to another. Her work crosses a threshold where the world is magically transformed.
Maria Bajt was born in Stockholm in 1976 and educated at the Royal Institute of Art. She has been based in Berlin for many years. Her art has been exhibited in cities such as Berlin, Stockholm, Turku, Brussels, and Minneapolis. She has exhibited at Wanås Konst and Norrtälje konsthall and has in recent years worked on several artistic installations in Helsingborg, Lammhult, Kristianstad, and Örebro.
Hannaleena Heiska
Hannaleena Heiska is one of the most prominent Finnish artists of her generation. Known for her ”alla prima” paintings, velvety charcoal drawings, installations, performances and video works, Heiska’s work is characterized by a profound interest in the limits and liminality of humanity, especially in relation to other animals. She creates thematic wholes that transport their viewers into intense experiences of imagined worlds and other universes, often mirroring historical phenomena, our lived reality, and possible futures in fantastical ways.
Heiska’s deep knowledge of the origins of her trade and materials is translated in her work as a unique air of timelessness – a hint to what might remain after us, or what possibly was before. In the exhibition we see, among other things, drawings from the series “Camouflage”, in which the artist was inspired by makeup and hairstyles created by activists to disturb facial recognition – ways for the modern individual to exist in a digital world of constant surveillance. We also encounter a series of charcoal drawings of observatories – mute, closed buildings emerging from the velvety darkness of the coal.
Hannaleena Heiska was born in 1973 in Oulu, Finland, and educated at the Academy of Fine Arts in Helsinki. She has exhibited at, among other places, the Gothenburg Museum of Art (2015), Espace Louis Vuitton in Tokyo (2012), and the Contemporary Art Centre in Vilnius, Lithuania (2010). Her works are represented in many public collections, including the Gothenburg Museum of Art, the Finnish national gallery Kiasma in Helsinki, and the Espoo Museum of Modern Art (EMMA).
Hannaleena Heiska
Maria Bajt