The 1st at Moderna: Jukka Korkeila

For the 1st at Moderna, Jukka Korkeila has created a site-specific work. In an almost square room he has painted directly on the walls, as has been his wont the last few years. While participating in a Nordic group show at Gallery Giò Marconi in Milan in 2002, he asked himself whether it was possible to do a wall-painting at all. He gave his answer in the form of an action that turned into an affirmative experience, providing him with a liberating distance to the restricted format of the canvas. It was an immediate action in a space, combined with existing drawings.

Jukka Korkeila received his education in his homeland Finland. He studied architecture before specialising in painting, first in Helsinki and then in Berlin. The space has always played a decisive role in his imagery. He moves effortlessly between abstraction and figuration within one and the same painting. He applies the paint with a powerful force. Is he perhaps engaged in a fruitless struggle for the purity of form, being a Finnish artist brought up in Aalto Land? Or is he charging even the most insignificant spot with meaning, as a reflection of Karelian folklore? Well, yes and no, as his already massive output bears witness to. It is precisely in the dynamic field between one and the other, between fiction and reality, that he paints. His subject range is astonishing. Bellies and thighs swell up, erected penises emerge, tears are mixed with sperm. He paints fat bodies that are a far cry from the prevalent ideals. Jukka Korkeila has said that the fat man is the last nigger of the Western world. In his works, the layers of meaning are packed tightly and the provocations are plentiful with references to gay and popular culture. Will the viewer be provoked and shocked? I think not. Rather, one feels initiated, involved and moved, as his painterly skills draw us into the image and open up a window to a singular, mythical and fantastical world.

At the 2004 São Paolo Biennial, Jukka Korkeila exhibited an installation of paintings, Doubting Thomas – a 15 metre suite of works partly painted directly on the walls, sampled with existing canvases such as Tyrolean Sunset in acrylic and charcoal. A Buddha-like figure with a fat, white torso flexes his arm in order to set in motion three balls attached to a string. He gazes tenderly through his glasses on what might very well be his amputated testicles. The precisely drawn lines executed with apparent ease place Jukka Korkeila firmly in a tradition. Every now and then we hear that painting is dead. For Jukka Korkeila, each deathblow is an affirmation of the vitality of painting. For him, the act of painting is a way of living in the margin, a way of maintaining his belief in the innate ability of art to fight against prejudice – and stand up for our right to reflection. Painting is a slow and in some respect inefficient medium that requires a specific form of presentation, carrying with it spatial and temporal restrictions. By working on a large scale, he invites the viewer to take part in the work and to share a physical experience – first in São Paolo, and now in Stockholm.

The Kindest Artist in the World is the title of a video by the Swedish artist Annika Ström. In a correspondence with a fictitious friend, she wrote that she had spent many years looking for the kindest artist in the world. To her great surprise, she finally found that the kindest artist in the world was a man – Jukka Korkeila. Her video work portrays him with a warm smile, peering out from under the brim of his fur cap. A Buddha-like figure, a Santa Claus – an artist, apparently far removed from cans of spray paint and ejaculating pandas, and at the same time very close. Jukka Korkeila’s paintings are arenas depicting chains of events without beginning or end. He claims that he works in an eternal contradiction of ideas, iconography and painting, where no part is subordinate to another.

Prior to completing his project at Moderna Museet, Jukka Korkeila spent some time in Lima, Peru, where he had a solo exhibition at Sala Louis Miro Quesada Garland, Municipalidad Miraflores. The name of the exhibition space corresponds to the suggestive titles of Korkeila’s pieces: He brakes for rainbows (acrylic on canvas, 2003), If it is trying to seduce you, cut it off (acrylic, charcoal on canvas, 2003) or Sir Eat-a-lot and pause boy face the moment of truth (watercolour, ink on paper, 2002). In a letter from Lima, he wrote, “This is like being in a surreal greenhouse. Enormous layers of fog drift in from the sea, covering the city for days so I don’t get to see the sun.” The surreal greenhouse, in the broadest sense of the word, has now taken its place in Jukka Korkeila’s installation at Moderna Museet.

Curator: Ann-Sofi Noring