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A painter passionately committed to exploring the inherent properties, color, and luminosity of form, Anneli Kivinen creates work that moves seamlessly between two approaches… |
A painter passionately committed to exploring the inherent properties, color, and luminosity of form, Anneli Kivinen creates work that moves seamlessly between two approaches—abstracted expressionism and simplified figuration. Her oeuvre is compelling in its diversity. Kivinen’s painterly approach revolves around uncovering the spirit of each color. She paints intuitively, instinctually coloring her canvases in bright palettes of brilliant hues. Inspired by the natural world, she infuses her works with a Zen-like spirit of harmony and balance. In fact, it is this kind of spirituality that motivates her work.
From her free-form abstracts and figurative works, to the shimmering narratives, Kivinen creates incredibly fluid, vibrant, and epic works on canvas and rice paper. Kivinen, a prolific artist whose consistent studio practice has led her to become a master of her technique, has refined and developed a methodology of layering paint into a unique, innovative, and internationally acclaimed art form. With numerous exhibitions behind her, Kivinen triumphs as a painter at the height of her career, thoroughly at ease within her chosen medium. Kivinen synthesizes historical and contemporary styles, creating evocative images that examine the tradition of painting and the role of the figure in art. In works such as Birthday Party and Family Meeting she uses every pretext to present her figures, not as articulated bodies, but as looming shapes, which are as eloquent in their silhouettes as they are mysterious in their identity, and sometimes their actions. As an experimental and vigorous artist, Kivinen effortlessly convinces us that she has not only perfected her craft, but that she has an impeccable instinct for the emotionally evocative power of color, movement, texture, and shape.
Kivinen’s strength of vision and personal style always resonate deeply within the recesses of the viewer’s heart and imagination. Her innovations are more emotional than formal; her works are forces—joyful, expressive, cosmic surges that explode the conventions and boundaries of the canvas frame. Epilogue and Hot Salsa are exemplary of Kivinen’s penchant for monolithic, eccentric, dynamic forms and bursts of color. Her works evoke a sense of abundance; swirling arabesques of color, in brilliant and translucent shades of red, blue, yellow, and green, are rich, luxurious, sensuous, fluid, and overflowing. Sucking viewers into their oceanic swirl, the works carry them along in their coils. Kivinen’s works are suspended moments of liquid in motion, embodying an intense and energetic physicality, an exuberant expression of pleasure and vitality. The magic emerges in the tension between control and spontaneity, and the result is invariably surprising, poetic, and spiritual.
