FI EN

HANNA HYY

Hanna Hyy (b. 1990) lives and works in Raasepori. I grew up in Southern Savo in Mikkeli and Savonlinna, where I went to Savonlinna Senior Secondary School of Arts and Music. I graduated from the Department of Painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in 2019. Before attending the Academy, I studied at the Free Art School and Pekka Halonen Academy. I held my latest solo exhibitions at the Finnish Painters’ Union gallery in 2022 and the Kosminen gallery in 2020. I also took part in a well-known international group exhibition in Denmark, Charlottenborg Spring Exhibition, in 2020. I have exhibited at several joint exhibitions in Finland, the most recent of which was Modern Love at Helsinki Contemporary in 2021. In 2023, my works will be displayed at the Mänttä Art Festival in addition to the Nuoret 2023 (Young Artists) exhibition. Since graduating, I have received grants from the Arts Promotion Centre Finland, the Finnish Cultural Foundation, and the Finnish Art Society to support my work. My works can be found in numerous private collections both in Finland and overseas as well as in the Finnish National Gallery and Hämäläis-Osakunta collections. I’m a candidate member of the Finnish Painters’ Union. My hobbies include wood sculpting, and I’m also an avid gardener and mushroom picker and I am deeply concerned about the state of the environment.

@hyyhanna
https://hannahyy.fi

Exhibited at Taidehalli 22.4.-28.5.2023

ARTWORKS

I was a teenage horsegirlboss
fabric, plastercast on Mdf-board, water colour, oil paint 120 x 200 cm
2023

fabric, plastercast on Mdf-board, water colour, oil paint 120 x 200 cm
2023

fabric on Mdf-board, water colour, oil paint 120 x 200 cm
2023

I’m curious and open to expand the material expression of traditional painting towards a more collage-like technique in terms of both paints and priming. My work almost exclusively involves painting live subjects. The human eye, combined with a swaying and impatient body, gives me an opportunity to keep to the observation.

Especially recently, I’ve used toys as models or other things that look like toys due to their size. The innocence of toys, using them to makes models of the world and the way pop culture uses them in the context of horror are examples of how powerful the ideas are that toys convey. Attitudes towards toys and how these change as people grow up is not the theme of my work; my work is defined by the complex and contradictory emotional charge that toys carry. It resonates with the other themes that lie beneath the surface themes, value conflicts and relationships with beings. 

My work at the Nuoret 2023 (Young Artists) exhibition deals with social moulds and living between, above and below them. The focus is on the slowness of change that depends on perspective as well as the speed of change; the accompanying feelings of pain, fear and insecurity are what I reflect on in my multi-part work.