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Susanna Vuorio

10.8.2022 - 4.9.2022

“End of Summer Crash”, paintings

In this exhibition I’m mostly showing paintings that were finished this year. Some of the works were finished in a matter of days, some I have been working on for several years.  

I work in an improvisatory fashion, without sketches, painting from imagination. My paintings come from the stream of consciousness or subconsciousness, from life situations that I’ve experienced or seen myself. This year’s world events drove me to escape to my past life in some of the subjects, and working with difficult subjects, I had to stop often. The name of the exhibition came from the location of the gallery, from shopping center slogans and from the signs of the times when it feels that the whole world is soon crashing down.

By painting I try to figure out what’s going on around here. When I paint, I never know what’s happening. I don’t have a compulsion to follow a set of rules, rather the opposite. However, all my works deal with what it is to be human. Because of my method of work, my paintings are independent works, sometimes very different from each other.

Lately I’ve been thinking about Willem de Kooning’s description of his works as “glimpses” of the world. Also, about how history feels like it’s repeating itself. Modernism feels surprisingly current again. To look at what’s happening to society, to look at people, feels right in a world where the deluge of images of comfort is overrepresented.

With my paintings I try to tell in an honest way something that is not necessarily always pretty, fun or easy to explain, like art is often expected to be. I feel that the tradition of expressive painting is to me an instrument of free thought, a means to express such things that I can’t express with words. I don’t want to silence them or mute them by aesthetic embellishments even if it might be profitable to do so.

My work has been supported by the Arts Council of Finland.


Susanna Vuorio is from Lahti. She went to study in Helsinki and graduated in 2006 from the Free Art School. She continued her studies at the Masters program at Aalto University but dropped off as her family moved to Turku. She is working in Turku at a studio rented from the Finnish Artists’ Studio Foundation in the House of Art at the former Rettig tobacco factory.

In 2005, Vuorio won the first prize in the Art of Analyste young artists’ competition with her work “Washing Dishes at 6:25”. She has continued dealing with everyday subjects in an expressive idiom since then. Her paintings represent figurative characters, often in recognizable situations. Her main medium is oil, but she has also been combining her paintings with “found object” installation elements such as security cameras, ticket dispenser machines and bread bag clips.

After graduating, Vuorio has been displaying her work regularly and participated in several group exhibitions in Finnish galleries and museums. In addition to private collections, the State of Finland, Tampere Art Museum, Wihuri Foundation and Art of Basware have acquired her work to their collections.

Picture above: Susanna Vuorio, Anna´s pub 1, oil on mdf board, 112 x 85cm, 2022 

Susanna Vuorio, CV

Susanna Vuorio, Homepage