Over the past year, Marika Mäkelä (born 1947 in Oulu) has been working on her retrospective for the Sara Hildén Art Museum in Tampere. During this period, she has had the opportunity to review her “personal art history”, to see her own paintings after long intervals, to recall what she thought, knew and felt when working on a particular painting in the 1970s or 1980s. These experiences, recognitions and memories have produced new works.

With reference to these new paintings, Mäkelä herself has observed that where she used to pick her themes from among all the pictorial and decorative motifs of the world she can now pick them from her own garden.

We will now have the opportunity to enjoy these and other paintings by Marika Mäkelä from the Secret Garden, Rights Immemorial and Cosmic Senses series at Galerie Anhava’s new premises. These paintings, like Marika’s works always, are strong and sensitive, free and precise, candid and wily.

Ilona Anhava

 

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