Hannu Riikonen became acquainted with art and the life of an artist when he was still a child in the early 1950s in Korpilahti. Summer art camps were organised there with well-known professional artists as instructors. Riikonen’s father, a farmer who was interested in art, used to put up the teachers in his home. Following the work of the artists gave the young man the idea that he, too, might become an artist when he grew up. The father later quashed his more serious aspirations of training to be an artist, and instead of the Finnish Art Academy School in the Ateneum Art Museum in Helsinki, he applied for admission to the Technical School there.

Alongside his training, Riikonen also made collages of objects and regularly visited exhibitions. The socially committed realist and surrealist works in the Young Artists exhibition in Kunsthalle Helsinki in 1968 made a strong impression on him. Two years later, he himself participated in the Young Artists exhibition with five assemblages. However, Riikonen soon began to feel that the social realism of the time was too restrictive, and he found freedom of expression in surrealism: Surrealism is the mainstay of my whole oeuvre. It is far enough removed from real life to allow one to deal with everything through it. I already leafed through André Breton’s Surrealist Manifesto when I was still a young boy.

Hannu Riikonen is known for his brightly painted sculptures and reliefs of human and animal subjects. The figures of his sculptures are fulsome and multi-dimensional in their composition. Riikonen has developed an original technique for producing them. He carves and assembles pieces of wood into the basic form of the sculpture, which he then covers with plaster and cellular plastic and finishes with acrylic paint and lacquer. During the last few decades, his idiom has changed to become more spare and abstract. Also, the bright colours have given way to a black and white palette in some works, and the sculptures have taken a quadrangular form with almost identical faces.

The spectrum of Riikonen’s subject matter is broad. He explores subjects and global questions raised by the media ironically and “in a carnival spirit”, as he himself has described his way of working. His colourful and lively execution of figurative subjects has caused critics to categorise Riikonen’s art within the framework of naivism. On the other hand, his grandiose and decorative works could equally well be regarded as a kind of contemporary baroque.

The Layers exhibition features nine works by Hannu Riikonen: Globalization (2005), Be Happy with Your Lot (2005), Africa Baroque (2009), Jaunt (2010), Trust and Loyalty (2012), Globular Troll (2017), Listening to the Family Tree (2020), Ruminant (2021) and Dancing Bear (2022).

Artwork: Hannu Riikonen, Be Happy with Your Lot, 2005

Photo of artwork: Vesa Aaltonen
Photo of artist: Tommi Riikonen