Soile Yli-Mäyry_ Artist Page
Soile Yli-Mäyry
Soile Yli-Mäyry, Asphalt Dream, 2013, Oil on Canvas, 44”x 55”, $26,000
Soile Yli-Mäyry is a Finnish artist with an impressive international CV. Immensely energetic, she has had more than 250 exhibitions worldwide. Her work reflects this energy. Made with a palette-knife, it is physically bold, one might almost say impatient, in its handling of the artist’s material.
Finland had a tradition of mythic and symbolist painting. Its best known painter of the Early Modern period was Akseli Gallen-Kallela [1865-1961], who made illustrations to the Kalevala, Finland’s national epic. His paintings have a Symbolist element, but this is much stronger in the work of a younger and shorter-lived contemporary, Hugo Simberg [1873-1917]. Simberg once defined the function of art in this way: He said it was ‘the ability to transport oneself from the midst of a cold winter to a lovely summer’s morning and sense it all, feel how nature awakens and your own harmony in tune with it. That is what I require from a work of art. It must say something and say it so loud that it carries us away.’ I suspect that this is a sentiment with which Soile Yli-Mäyry would agree.
Simberg’s affinity was with the artists of the Vienna Secession, Gustav Klimt [1865-1918] and Egon Schiele [1890-1918]. After a period of quasineglect, these two painters have beeen catapulted into the limelight again by a series of enormous prices at auction, which mark a shift in public taste away from the masters of the Ecole de Paris and towards Austrian and German Symbolism and Expressionism. One can easily see that Yli-Mäyry has links with both Symbolist and Expressionist impulses. Her work combines strong color and impulsive handling with an interest in patterning that recalls some of Klimt’s techniques in particular. When she paints the human figure, however, she gives in a tense wiriness and angularity that recalls some of the early drawings of Schiele. One can also perhaps detect some influence from the work of another Viennese artist of the same epoch, Oskar Kokoschka [1886-1980], whose handling of paint is much looser than that of either Klimt or Schiele.
One of the hallmarks of the first decade of the 21st century has been a return to figuration, often of a slightly twisted and eccentric kind. However, there has also been a lack of direction, especially [it seems to me as a European] in the United States. A recent issue of Vanity Fair, devoted largely to the New York art world, hymned a new group of young artists as ‘international, unpredictable, deeply individual.’ In journalistic terms, this amounts to saying that no-one at this moment knows which way the cat is going to jump, or even if it has any power to jump left in it. To be blunt, the Modernist/Contemporary project looks as if it is in trouble, sustained more by hype and wishful thinking than by any discernible or definable new departure.
It is situations of this sort that provide genuinely international artists like Soile Yli-Mäyry with an opportunity to strut their stuff. She is a genuinely international painter. She can pick her influences and exemplars from wherever she choose. She has no obligation to belong to any school. The paintings in this exhibition are the product of a purely personal impulse. That, without question, is their strength.
Edward Lucie-Smith