Karoliina Hellberg: VILLE

It’s a sweltering day and the house can barely take it.

There are mountains here, and a pink sky at sunset. By the shore lies an abandoned house, and palms and low bushes grow nearby.

The sea appears odd.

One building has a circular room in the middle of it from where you can set off in any direction.

Another room lies empty, only a woven Gobelin on the floor with images of geese, pheasants and swans – all this to show the property.

In the park is a bulb-shaped tree. On a night flight a hint of frozen landscapes.

The lights should be off.

A night room – trees swaying in the wind, and a beach house – a pond in the middle of the expanse.

Pictures of people alive, and each room has pictures.

Karoliina Hellberg (b. 1987 in Porvoo) is an artist who lives in Helsinki. She has a Master’s degree from the Finnish Academy of Fine Arts and works primarily with paintings and drawings, though she also presents work as installations. She writes about painting and visual portrayal. Hellberg’s dissertation at the Academy of Fine Arts dealt with the aesthetic ghosts that can manifest themselves in people, sounds, images or places. Such apparitions may be a secret felt between oneself and another, a recollection that determines the present, or a meaning sensed in an object.

Hellberg took part in the 2014 exhibition of Academy of Fine Arts dissertations. In the same year she was awarded grants from Helsinki Litho and Friends of the Academy of Fine Arts. In the last three years she has lived and worked not only in Helsinki but also in Paris and London: at the Cité Internationale des Arts residence in Paris in autumn 2014 and on a student exchange at the Slade School of Fine Arts in London in 2013.

Hellberg’s works can be found in the Fund of Päivi and Paavo Lipponen collection, which is deposited at the Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma, and in private collections in Finland, the United Kingdom and Belgium. Hellberg’s work has previously been shown in private exhibitions at the Kulma Gallery in Porvoo’s Art Factory, Gallery Kapina and Gallery Napa. In 2015, Hellberg was awarded a six-month grant for artistic endeavours by the Finnish Cultural Foundation.