3 rd Day /Underground Painting

All my works are for sale via helsinkicontemporary.com in Helsinki, Finland Popular imagery meet the classical tradition in Ville Löppönen’s skillful painting. Over the years Löppönen’s art has been influenced by graphic novels, Western Church art, and the Eastern tradition of religious icon painting, but also the everyday life and his own family inspires him. His expression has evolved gradually from figurative, even photorealistic, portrait painting towards the abstract, and the organic. Löppönen’s imagery deals with the healing nature of love and the human struggle with the self and its contradictions. He is concerned with the conflict between religious service and ego-based artistic creation. Löppönen sees his art as being theological contemporary art. The painting process itself is an act of spiritual reflection or prayer, and full of enjoyment. Löppönen’s most recent works carry on the artist’s journey of exploration out of darkness towards the nature of light. The upcoming Five Space Helmets After Les Demoiselles d’Avignon exhibition concretely situates light in the present time and moment, via questions about the feminine, gender and quantum reality. In addition to interpretations of light, painting is a place where Löppönen deals with the movement, the metamorphosis, caused by the challenges of the time that are prompting social upheaval. Painting builds, arranges and creates the new. Ville Löppönen (b. 1980, Savonlinna) graduated from the Department of Painting at the Finnish Academy of Fine Arts in 2007 and Master of Orthodox Theology from the University of Eastern Finland in 2018. Löppönen has participated in group exhibitions in Finland and abroad, both in Europe and North America. His solo exhibitions have been shown, e.g. in Mikkeli Art Museum in 2015, and in the Bonnafont Gallery in San Francisco in 2013. His works are represented in public collections, e.g. the Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma, The Niemistö Collection and the Finnish Art Society, as well as in numerous private collections in Finland and abroad. Löppönen has also participated in art fairs including the VOLTA8 Basel Art Fair in 2012 (with Gallery Kalhama & Piippo Contemporary, Helsinki), and the TIAF Toronto International Art Fair, Toronto, in 2013 (with De Luca Fine Art Gallery, Toronto). In 2013, his portrait of the Finnish painter Henry Wuorila-Stenberg won third prize at Portrait Now! the Brewer J.C. Jacobsen’s Portrait Award in Denmark.