Otto Mäkilä's letters and aphorisms reveal a reflective artist who was both demanding and passionate about art. "All that I own is a red, restless spark, or to be much more exact, it owns me and it is burning me," the artist wrote in 1953. Mäkilä is regarded in Finnish art history as a surrealist. He himself never defined his art as surrealist, however, even though art critics in the 1940s began referring to him as the leading Finnish surrealist painter. Following the ideas of Edwin Lydén (1879-1956), Mäkilä thought that the essence of new, modern art was the expression of one's own inner visions. In his paintings, Mäkilä kept returning to the same themes: man's place in the world, the meaning and mystery of existence, and the inevitability of death. An essential feature in Mäkilä's art is that he painted several versions of the same topic, and kept returning to the same themes even after many years. The exhibition spans a period that starts in the late 1920s and ends with the last years of Mäkilä's life, presenting the entire range of Mäkilä's themes and his creative periods. The Finnish art world first became aware of Mäkilä in the '20s through his vibrant portraits. That period of his career which is classified as surrealist begins in the early '30s. A crucial factor for Mäkilä's artistic maturity was the time he spent studying in Paris from 1930-1931 and several trips made elsewhere in Europe. The Second World War, in which Mäkilä participated in the capacity of a clerk and a messenger, took death and anxiety from a conceptual level to everyday reality. War experiences in Mäkilä's work from the 1940s are rendered in a reduced and aestheticised, yet candid form. Ceaselessly searching for new things and challenging his own ideas, Mäkilä's art took yet another new turn in the 1950s, interpreting the clash between man and the modernising society in the so-called 'machine compositions'. Mäkilä... http://www.art-report.com/en/events/otto-m-kil-red-restless-spark_en undefined

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