Kari Vehosalo:
We hope you are OK

Artist page

Doppelgänger I, 2013
oil on canvas
160 x 196 cm

Kari Vehosalo (born 1982) is a philosopher and a craftsman. His works address power, its essence and structures, and how even unconsciously the social contract steers and restricts our way of being. Polite behaviour is usually a ritual devoid of content, but nonetheless required in order to pass as a human being.

Vehosalo thus takes as his theme the psychopathology of everyday life. Caring, death, pleasure, humiliation and pain are hidden in his work and become flesh in the viewer’s experience.

Vehosalo is an artist who not only thinks thoroughly and precisely but also paints with extreme consideration and care and by taking his time. His oil paintings are constructed slowly, in thin layers. He often works in a grey scale, which, however, is by no means “colourless”, and even when he does use colours so that you immediately notice them, they are carefully chosen and considered. There is nothing random about Vehosalo’s paintings, just as he appears to think that there is nothing random about reality either.

Works by Kari Vehosalo are in the collections of the Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art, the Sara Hildén Art Museum, and the Helsinki Art Museum.

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Something wicked this way comes (While Thinking of Marquis de Sade), 2012
oil on canvas
135 cm

Modern Guilt III, 2014
oil on paper
34 cm

Doppelgänger II, 2013
oil on canvas
190 x 148 cm

We hope you are OK, 2014
oil on canvas
138 x 190 cm

Modern Guilt II, 2014
oil on paper
39 x 28 cm

Picture of Dorian Gray, 2013
oil on canvas
155 x 129 cm

The Corruption of The Working Class (greatest is love), 2014
oil on canvas
200 x 163 cm

Modern Guilt IV
2014
oil on paper
35 x 27 cm

Modern Guilt I
2014
oil on paper
43 x 31 cm

Installation view of exhibition "We hope you are OK", Galerie Anhava, 2014