
Artist: Riikka Sormunen
Title: Holiday, 2025
Medium: Deckled Varnished Giclee Print
Size: 20 x 20 Inches
Edition: 20
Price: £450

*available Thursday October 9th, 2025
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Riikka Sormunen (b. 1987, Helsinki) turns daydreams into jewel toned oil paintings where fashion-editorial poise meets surrealist unease. After a semester of fashion design she pivoted to illustration, building a clientele that ranged from Finnish magazines to Japanese apparel before committing solely to canvas in 2016. Working on unprimed linen, she applies thin, lucent layers of oil so crimsons and viridians bleed like textile dye, then tightens select zones lace cuffs, serpent scales, cat pupils to photographic clarity. The resulting images feel simultaneously vintage and hyper-contemporary: Klimt-like pattern fields float around blank-faced women who grip wilted bouquets or let goldfish dangle from their sleeves, every object posed as if for an unseen camera.
Influences converge in her studio: early Lucian Freud for fleshy tension, Ukiyo-e prints for flattened perspective, and Nordic folklore for latent darkness. Solo exhibitions at Allouche Gallery (LA) and Rhodes Contemporary (London) sold out rapidly, while group stints at Dallas Contemporary and the “Nordic Delights” tour confirmed international appetite. Recent pieces such as Ghost Friend and Cat’s Eye push scale toward life-size, intensifying the tension between decorative beauty and psychological vacancy. Sormunen photographs her own floral still-lifes as source material, then digitally distorts petals into acidic hues no garden could grow, reinforcing the calculated artificiality she calls “soft sensuality under surveillance.” Living back in Helsinki after residencies in Tokyo and Lisbon, she continues to probe how femininity, nature, and consumer imagery can be arranged then eerily silenced inside a single gilded frame.