Elina Merenmies

Elina Merenmies follows in the figurative tradition, with formats ranging from small drawings to large scale paintings. The cast of characters depicted and the tales told reveal the leaning of the artist towards singular contexts and phenomena. Her gaze is often directed towards existential darkness. Human anxiety and loneliness are recurring themes in Merenmies’s work, but humour is at least as important. Suffering is countered by hope, with links here to the martyr tradition found in Christian art. Elina Merenmies’s pictures are unique meeting points for myths, folktales, dreams and hallucinations. There are traces in her visual idiom of her previous experience of performance art, experimental music, and new painting techniques as computer aided painting.