February 06, 2026 by Roy Haapakoski

Pushed gently down the stairs by a muse

Makasiini Contemporary
Helsinki FI
28.11.2025–11.1.2026

Reimaging painterly experience

The works in the exhibition are reinterpretations, remixes and free associations based on that painting I experienced in my childhood.

I don't remember if this was the first painting I've seen, but it's the first one I've stopped by, become fixated on and returned to. The work is clumsy, but expressively effective. It's 1976, I'm four years old and clumsy myself, I couldn't pronounce expressive even if I knew the word, but instead I'm enchanted by the painting that my parents have just bought for me from a lady who painted it.

Fifty years later I find myself looking at that painting again. In reinterpretation, I take the reference painting apart and build new works around the motifs from it. The enigmatic nature of the painting is something I have since come to appreciate in art in general and have strived for in my own work: the work does not empty itself of interpretations with one viewing, but rather contains a mysticism that makes you return to it and look at it in a new way.

February 06, 2026 by Roy Haapakoski

Knife and Fork Etiquette

Galerie Lisa-Marie Pirker
Salzburg AT
24.4.–30.5.2025

Paintings of lightness

“I have tried to remove weight, sometimes from people, sometimes from heavenly bodies, sometimes from cities; above all I have tried to remove weight from the structure of stories and from language.”

― Italo Calvino

January 17, 2025 by Roy Haapakoski

IN THE AIR TONIGHT

Makasiini Contemporary
Turku FI
10.2.–2.2.2025

Paintings of nostalgia

The starting point for these paintings is the meticulous childhood memories —those I cherish and recall in my own way. Mint ice cream, orange plastic chairs, the pungent smell of a copy machine in the basement of my father's workplace, a lost tooth in a Pepsi bottle, a mining waste pond. The trigger for memories is often a scent or a taste, which in my paintings transform into chemical compounds such as helium, ammonia, or sulfur.

In 17th-century medicine, nostalgia was classified as a disease. The modernization of society and rural migration caused a longing for the past and what was lost, largely driven by urbanization. In my paintings, I work through memories from the 1970s and 1980s, reaching from the digital 2020s towards something "authentic" and collectively recognizable.

Paradoxically, memories are both precise and powerful, yet also unreliable and possibly even self-deceptive. Still, they are a crucial part of my identity. This contradiction resonates with the nature of abstract painting, which distances itself from depicting the visible world and allows the viewer to reflect their own emotions into the artwork.

This exhibition is supported by the Arts Promotion Centre Finland.