Eeva-Leena Eklund: Things

In her second exhibition at Galerie Anhava, Eeva-Leena Eklund fills her canvases with her rich visual language: lush flower still lifes, expressive animal figures with disarming gestures, giant pansies, ball paintings approaching abstraction, scarves and candy pizzas full of joy and life. While preparing the exhibition, Eklund's gaze has occasionally turned back in time: to the path that led to this moment, to the works painted along the way, and to her archive, which has grown vast, part of which now spreads across the wall as a huge assemblage of objects and paintings, now also in the gallery. Eklund's working method is characterised by the rejection of art conventions, such as subject matter deemed suitable or restrained and conventional composition, and by a conscious feminist subversion of norms. Eeva-Leena Eklund (b. 1972, Pori) graduated from the Finnish Academy of Fine Arts in 2003. She lives and works in Helsinki. Eklund's works have been exhibited in many private and group exhibitions, and her works have been acquired by numerous private and significant public collections. In 2020 Eklund was invited as the first Finnish artist to realise a large solo exhibition in the commission exhibition series of EMMA – Espoo Museum of Modern Art and the Saastamoinen Foundation.