Vilho Lampi

The exhibition presents Lampi’s most prominent works from the 1920s and 1930s and is mainly compiled from the collections of Oulu Museum of Art. There are over 50 works on display, most of which are oil paintings. Lampi’s life is also illustrated through photographs and documentary material.

Vilho Lampi spent his whole live balancing between his calling as an artist and his duties at the family farm. He often had time for painting in the evenings and at night. The subjects of his paintings came from Liminka itself: portraits, people close to him, the milieus of cottages and landscapes. Large and rough country themes tinged Lampi’s works in the late 1920s. This was the time for defiant power paintings, such as Mestaaja, Pitäjän keisari and Viinankeittäjät. The Liminganjoki river, with its numerous wooden bridges and idyllic houses and outbuildings, was one of Lampi’s most beloved and well-known subjects.

Vilho Lampi had only one solo exhibition in his lifetime, in Oulu in 1931. However, his works were included in the annual Helsinki exhibitions of the Artists’ Association of Finland. Lampi’s works received praise, but his entire output was not exhibited to a major extent until his memorial exhibitions in Oulu and Helsinki in the 1950s.

The exhibition is executed in collaboration with Oulu Museum of Art and assembled around the painting View from Liminka, which is part of Katarina and Leonard Bäcksbacka’s donated art collection at HAM. The exhibition includes objects and documents borrowed from the Vilho Lampi Museum in Liminka and Lampi’s iconic 1932 Self-portrait borrowed from Turku Art Museum.

The exhibition is compiled by curators Tarja Kekäläinen from Oulu Museum of Art and Mikko Oranen from HAM.