Maija Närhinen

Maja Närhinen is interested in human vision. She explores the winding roads of illusion and the reliability of our perceptions. Her work often blurs the lines between two-dimensional imagery and three-dimensional sculpture. Närhinen places mundane objects in new contexts and composes them together in paintings. This involves a parallel presentation, in which items are simultaneously inherently themselves and representative of something else. The piece Watercolours features five used watercolour cakes. They are concrete objects – tools of the watercolour artist. At the same time, Närhinen directs our attention to pigment as one of the most essential elements of watercolour art. Maja Närhinen studied painting and sculpture at the Academy of Fine Arts, Helsinki, and completed her master’s degree in 1988.