Matti Peltokangas’s road to becoming an artist has been long and winding. As a child, he was keen on drawing. He trained in metalworking at a vocational school and eventually found employment as an engraver at Kultakeskus, a goldsmith manufacturer in Hämeenlinna. At the age of 17, he took a course in printmaking at Tapani ”Lito” Lemminkäinen’s private art school in Lahti, and he built an etching press for himself. Friends sent in some of his prints for the entrance examination to the Finnish Art Academy School. He passed the examination, and at the Finnish Art Academy School he studied first painting for three years and then sculpture for two years. After his studies, he worked for several years as an assistant to the sculptors Heikki Häiväoja and Kain Tapper.

Matti Peltokangas has shunned publicity. He has rarely given interviews, nor has he otherwise commented on his work or his private life in the media. He has preferred to remain in his studio producing his numerous large-scale commissioned works, and many of his public works are surely better known to the public than their creator. Peltokangas’s idiom ranges from the abstract to the figurative. For example, the monument to the late President of the Republic Lauri Kristian Relander that was unveiled in Helsinki in 1996 is non-figurative, while the statue of the late President Urho Kekkonen that was erected in Raahe in 2008 and that of Count Gustaf Mauritz Armfelt (1757-1814) that was unveiled in Halikko in 2010 are both representational likenesses. Peltokangas has used different kinds of stone, bronze and wood varyingly in his sculptures, although his main material is stone. Stone is definitely my favourite material- it puts up enough resistance. There are countless different qualities of stone, starting from different types of marble, so the possibilities are boundless. Using stone is natural for me, a straightforward way of working. What you take away, you take away. Stone is thus always a clean material. Sometimes a suitable type of stone is found from Carrara in Italy, sometimes from Kotka or Heinola in Finland.

Peltokangas’s idiom is characterised by a carefully considered form and a rough surface treatment with the traces of working the material visible. In many of the works, jagged graphic grooves also lighten the hard, heavy feeling of the stone. Three of Peltokangas’s works are on show in the Layers exhibition: Strange Rain Last Night (2007), which is made of spectrolite, granite, jasper and green marble; Homage to a Cabbage (2013), a marble sculpture; and Should We Be Worried (2025), a work in spectrolite and marble.

 

Artwork: Matti Peltokangas, Homage to a Cabbage, 2013

Photo of artwork: Vesa Aaltonen
Photo of artist: Marja Leena Peltokangas