In her new works, Hannaleena Heiska strives to visualize existence by painting the invisible phenomena that shape our daily reality, seeking the deeper connections and meanings between them.

Hannaleena Heiska’s new solo exhibition Celestial Question Mark presents the versatile artist’s new, radiantly hued paintings. Her colours derive their intensity both from their juxtapositions and from her way of using the whiteness of the chalk ground as a source of light, producing a kind of inner glow in the painting. Recurring universal shapes such as arcs, twists, and swirls run through her work, combined with colours that glow like bright stars. Observatories formed a motif in Heiska’s earlier charcoal drawings. Working serially, she has also employed cinematic sci-fi imagery in her paintings to invoke reflections on human existence. Her latest exhibition directs our gaze again towards the cosmos, while at the same time plumbing the depths of the human mind and consciousness – places that are in many respects unknown frontiers just like distant celestial bodies. The exhibition takes its name from a photo of a giant cosmic question mark captured by the James Webb telescope in 2023, which scientists believe to be a distant galaxy. In this exhibition, astronomy is one source of inspiration for Heiska, as are the photographs of electrical energy generated by the 19th century French astronomer Étienne Léopold Trouvelot. In these works, Heiska strives to visualize existence by painting the invisible phenomena that shape our daily reality, seeking the deeper connections and meanings between them.