Merja Salonen Di Giorgio:
Tuoksuvia puita | Scented Trees

The Helsinki Artists' Association Art Lending office has a showroom in the elegant art nouveau hotel Home Hotel Jugend (previously known as GLO Hotel Art) located right in the heart of the city at Lönnrotinkatu. The pieces in the exhibition can be borrowed and bought right away via the Art Lending office.

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From the beginning of January 2026 until the end of March, Home Hotel Jugend hosts the exhibition Tuoksuvia puita | Scented Trees by Merja Salonen Di Giorgio. Curated by the Helsinki Artists' Association staff, the exhibition displays oil and tempera paintings on linen that have been made during the past 20 years.

The body of work of Merja Salonen Di Giorgio is strongly influenced by her situation between two cultures, the Finnish and the Italian. The paintings depict cultural environments and traces left by human lives. A goal more important than depicting figurative subjects is to catch the atmosphere, the essence of a place, and translate it into colours, to tangible form. The artist's synesthesia makes it possible to make the interpretation of the atmospheres into colours. She perceives the scents, sounds and atmospheres as colours. The viewer can imagine themselves in these places, in the courtyards of the Sicilian baroque 'palazzos' and renaissance gardens, and sense the Scented Trees.

Merja Salonen Di Giorgio has been working as a painter for more then 25 years. She has had several solo and group exhibitions both in Finland and abroad. Her pieces can be found in many museums and private collections in Europe, the United States, and Australia.

The work of Merja Salonen Di Giorgio in the Art Lending selection
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