PEKKA PAIKKARI: Winter Tales

Pekka Paikkari: Winter Tales is a catalogue published by Hostler Burrows on the occasion of the artist’s exhibition at HB381. 

About the Exhibition

Pekka Paikkari (b. 1960, Finnish) is a Helsinki-based ceramic artist known for his wall-mounted stoneware reliefs and monumental public installations. Paikkari’s compositions combine intentionality with entropy; they are produced through an aleatory process in which drying clay, sculpted and incised, splinters along chance rifts and is subsequently reassembled. His works are characterized by bifurcating lines and chalky, near monochrome hues which reveal the stark poetry of the icy Finnish landscape. Paikkari uses everyday objects as tools—bricks, dinner forks, gardening rakes, mops, and brooms—to carve indents and striations into flattened slabs of clay. Following a prolonged process of drying, the surface is exquisitely marked, inlaid with a web of linear patterns and natural fissures, which Paikkari complicates through expressionistic washes of paint and aluminum oxide.

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