Markus Heikkerö`s career has been wildly varied yet at the same time extremely consistent. The exhibition`s ambiguous title Life is a Bitch, baby... reflects the key preoccupations of Heikkerö`s art: love, death, pleasure and eternal return.
When Heikkerö began his artistic career in the 1960s in the underground movement, he bewildered audiences with his openly sexual, surrealist works. In his later paintings the focus has shifted to light and colour and broad, visionary worlds.
Different decades can be clearly distinguished in Heikkerö’s oeuvre. In the late 1960s and the 1970s, his style betrays an interest in surrealism, sci-fi films and the redefinition of inner and outer reality. Vibrant and colourful fantasies inspired by popular culture now appear for the first time in his work.
Heikkerö’s spray paintings from the 1980s feature such figures as Socrates wearing shades and postmodern portraits of Finnish pop culture celebrities. Heikkerö’s stay in the United States is reflected in his work from the 1980s as a shift in the use of light and his palette. In the new paintings, micro- and macrocosmic motifs intertwine in spiralling patterns.
The size of Heikkerö’s paintings begins to grow from the early 2000s. Youthful psychedelics are replaced by the full-blooded artist’s baroque extravaganzas of spatial illusion and sophisticated tonalities. The paintings contain numerous references to the history of painting and to Heikkerö’s sketches of cathedrals and urban architecture in Central and South Europe. |