Susanna Vuorio:
Susanna Vuorio: OUT OF IT – paintings

Susanna Vuorio: OUT OF IT – paintings

"When I start a new canvas, I don’t know what it will become. I don’t make plans. I don’t make sketches and I don’t paint after photographs. Usually it becomes a human figure, and it starts to tell me something.

Writers often say that their characters start to live their own lives. My process works in a similar fashion. I work on the painting until the figure and the situation becomes real. Sometimes it takes years, sometimes it’s a matter of a few days.

Lately, life has been precarious for many. Do you have to move away, or give up something important? Will there be a recession? Or a war? I think you can see it in my recent paintings. People are waiting, unsure if something is coming or not. It’s a bit like Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, which I read when I was young in the 90s, during the previous big recession. People are pretending everything will continue as usual, pretending to know what tomorrow will bring. But people seem present and absent at the same time. Everyone seems to be a bit out of it.

I thank Arts Promotion Centre Finland and The Finnish Cultural Foundation for supporting my work in 2025 and 2024, respectively."

Susanna Vuorio (b. 1977) is a painter born in Lahti. She studied painting at the Free Art School, Helsinki, graduating in 2006. Vuorio’s work has been exhibited in numerous solo and group shows. Her works are in the collections of the State of Finland, Wihuri Foundation, Tampere Museum of Art and Basware, and others. Vuorio is one of the founding members of Critical Gallery, founded in 2023 in Turku.

www.susannavuorio.com