Scholarship holder and the guest artist of the state of North Rhine-Westphalia.
14.4.-22.6.2025 Düsseldorf / Germany
The two-month residency period includes a month-long studio working residency and a solo exhibition at Atelje am Eck Gallery.
Opening speech at the Atelier am Eck
Katja Härkki - 'Dialogue' Opening 5.6.2025, 7 pm
Introduction: Gesine Kikol, curator
A warm welcome to the numerous guests. I am delighted that so many have come!
My name is Gesine Kikol, I am the curator of this exhibition, and have accompanied the artist Katja Härkki for a month and a half during her stay. Katja arrived in mid-April with a suitcase and a bag for skis, in which she had rolled up some canvases. These canvases were partly finished and partly unfinished paintings from the last few years.
When she arrived in her gigantic 140 square meter studio, she hung the paintings on the 8-meter-high studio wall and looked at them. And then the work began immediately.
Katja visited numerous exhibitions, museums, galleries, and off-spaces in Düsseldorf and its neighboring cities, comparing everything she saw with her pictures. She then began to revise her pictures piece by piece, adding something new.
She has transferred geometric surfaces from cubist paintings, stronger color contrasts from expressionist paintings, she has brought breaks into the paintings, or even very gentle color gradients and lines left standing from a previous version, which suggest more contemporary works. In this way, the pictures have developed into their final form and are now complete. And that is precisely the essence of exchange programs: that you expose yourself to new influences and bring something new into your work.
Katja Härkki was born in Helsinki and initially completed her master's degree in fashion design at the University of Art and Design in Helsinki. After working successfully as a fashion designer for many years, she completed a bachelor's degree in fine arts at the University of Lahti and a master's degree specializing in painting in Turku. She has therefore lived in various cities in Finland, including Tampere, the third largest city in Finland, surrounded by thousands of lakes and spectacular scenery, with which this exchange has now been taking place for exactly 20 years.
The themes of Härkki's paintings revolve around people, blossoming and growth, decay, and transience. It is about loneliness, the human form of women and men, whose poses often come from antiquity (Katja has just had a scholarship in Greece) or from pictures from art history, or even from contemporary sources.
The paintings have titles such as Awakening, The Apollo of the Forrest, The Singer of Paradise, or The Seductress. Using acrylic and oil on canvas, people, natural elements, and abstract forms are brought together in several layers and techniques to create complex and enigmatic depictions.
Who or what is waking up here? What is Apollo doing alone in the forest? Who is the singer, and who is the temptress? There are clues, but no direct answers.
I solved one of these riddles: in the picture 'The Singer of the Paradise', it is not the woman who is the singer, but this little bird here in the picture.
At the end of the exhibition, you can see three smaller pictures that Katja Härkki also painted at the end of her stay: they differ from the others because they were painted on a fresh canvas and have a great lightness. Here, she has incorporated elements of Düsseldorf, for example, two of the four sandstone statues that stand next to the Kunsthalle and depict the four arts. The neon colors, the two-dimensionality, and the stencils are influences from graffiti and street art.
And, of course, there is no lack of natural elements, which always find their way into the picture, either as a monochrome surface in the lower part of the picture, a single line in the form of a leaf, or as poured color that suggests a forest in the background.
The title, Dialogue, provides further access to the pictures.
The artist is in close contact and conversation with herself, reflecting on what she has seen, what she has painted, art and life itself, she is in dialogue with many other artists she has met during her stay here, she is in a strong dialogue with nature, which is already in the genes of the Finns and runs through every picture in natural elements. And she is in dialogue with all the new art she has seen here and ultimately also in dialogue with the audience of her pictures, the viewers, i.e., you and you.
That's why she thought of something special for this exhibition and prepared two questions:
Did one of the paintings awaken feelings in you?
And if so, which ones?
Did one of the paintings awaken thoughts in you?
And if so, which ones?
There are small slips of paper at the entrance, and a box is provided for them. It would be great if everyone could take part and continue the dialogue that the artist has opened up with her paintings.
