CANDIDATE 2003

Timo Heino

born 1962 in Tampere, lives in Helsinki.

Timo Heino graduated from the painting course at the Academy of Fine Arts in Helsinki in 1989 and has also studied sculpture. His output spans picture-objects that verge on being sculpture, and also installations.

Heino combines basic geometric forms, materials that represent, on the one hand, organic nature and, on the other hand, the technologies of the industrial world. Glossy black or brightly coloured plastic, tile, steel or a reflective surface frame recognisable or unrecognisable materials, such as old skis, hair, beeswax, blood, household dust or excrement, which are not, however, displayed as garbage. The purity of the colours and forms give even the materials of animal origin an innocence, and at the same time bring out the meanings that well up from their individual origins and history. But even the materials taken from nature have been manipulated, and the boundary between the synthetic and the natural is blurred.

Heino’s works open up to deal not just with life processes, but also with relationship with nature, technology and morality. They contain references to scientific, political, philosophical and religious themes.

Pauline von Bonsdorff