Exhibition: 5 Sep – 26 Oct 2025

Jukka Korkeila (Finland)

Solo Exhibition and Catalogue Presentation

As part of the exhibition series Contemporary Art from Finland, Wolf & Galentz Gallery presents the artist Jukka Korkeila, one of Finland’s most renowned contemporary painters. His works have been exhibited in numerous museums and galleries around the world; among others, he represented his home country at the São Paulo Art Biennale, he had a solo show at Moderna Museet in Stockholm and an extensive retrospective at the HAM Helsinki Art Museum.

We are delighted to have the opportunity to show Jukka Korkeila’s work in our gallery. Korkeila is a fantastic painter who, in addition to the two-dimensionality of the picture, also stands out for his masterful handling of three-dimensionality, often creating complex installative spatial arrangements into which his painting is integrated.

Between figuration and abstraction, his works are marked by an expressive gesture and often painted in vivid colours. The subjects of his paintings are, at least at a first glance, corpulent male bodies, sometimes depicted with genitals. ‘At a first glance’ because he manages to create highly multilayered images that are never fully or immediately decipherable; they remain open and they do not deliver any kind of clear ‘message’. Korkeila is openly gay and a devout Christian of the Eastern Orthodox Church – his works are always simultaneously about corporeality and spirituality. They are also about discrimination and shame, about power, violence and marginalisation, about grief, emotion, the soul, hope and light. That he manages to evoke all these divergent elements at once is undoubtedly due to his painterly skill, and certainly not least to the subtle irony that runs through his work.
He achieves something astonishing: (self-)irony in dignity. What emerges is a deeply human art – an art that engages with the very essence of what it means to be human.

This year, the Hämeenlinna Art Museum in Finland is dedicating a retrospective exhibition to Korkeila, which can be seen until 19 October 2025 and is entitled Pimeys on täynna valoa / Darkness is Full of Light, from which also the exhibition at Wolf & Galentz derives its title, in German: Dunkelheit ist voller Licht. On the occasion of the retrospective in Hämeenlinna, a catalogue was published in collaboration with Artbear Books, which will now be presented in Berlin as part of the exhibition.

Vita:

Born in 1968 in Hämeenlinna, Finland, where he also grew up, Korkeila now lives and works in Berlin, in Upper Hesse, Germany, and in Helsinki. After studying architecture and interior design, he studied art at the Finnish Academy of the Arts in Helsinki and at the Hochschule der Künste in Berlin in the 1990s. In 1999, he won the Young Artist of the Year award. He represented his homeland at the art biennial of São Paulo in 2004 and he participated in the Prague Biennials I and III. In 2014 and 2015 his works were presented at the fourth Bienal del Fin del Mundo in Mar del Plata, Argentina. He has solo shows at Moderna Museet, Stockholm, and at the Nordic Watercolour Museum in Skärhamn, Sweden. In 2017–2018, the HAM Helsinki Art Museum and the Serlachius Museum in Mänttä, Finland, dedicated a comprehensive retrospective exhibition to his works, titled Pleasure. In 2018, he was part of the exhibition Sanguine/Bloedrood, curated by Luc Tuymans, at the M HKA Museum for Contemporary Art in Antwerp, Belgium. In the following year he, together with his partner Markus Karger, curated the international exhibition In Situ in Hirzenhain and Gedern near Frankfurt on the Main in Germany. In 2019 he was awarded the State Prize for visual arts in Finland.