Erik Nieminen
Artist’s profile
Most important solo exhibitions
“Paradise”, High Line Nine Gallery, New York City
”Freefall”, McClure Gallery, Montreal
“The Unreal”, Albemarle Gallery, London
Most important group exhibitions
“I Sky You”, Magic Beans Gallery, Berlin
“Concurrent”, Winsor Gallery, Vancouver
“Pending Issues”, Galerie Weisser Elefant, Berlin
Most important awards
Bombay Sapphire Artisan Series Grand Prize
Elizabeth Greenshields award
Canada Council for the Arts Project Grant
Erik Nieminen is a Finnish-Canadian artist born in 1985. He achieved a BFA from the University of Ottawa in 2007 and an MFA from Concordia University in Montreal in 2010. He has exhibited in both Europe and North America, including recent solo shows in London, Montreal, and New York City. Present in both private and corporate collections, he is the recipient of numerous awards, including the Elizabeth Greenshields Grant and in 2018 became the Grand Prize Winner for the final edition of the Bombay Sapphire Artisan Series.
“My works present an independent reality, a world that is dependent on our real-world yet is separate from it. It is a liminal space, a portal into an unreal world. I seek to dismantle the reality that we inhabit in order to remake reality according to the logic inherent in the painting process. With that in mind, my works cannot be easily categorized, as elements from many genres combine into one. The paintings explore semi-real spaces where nature and architecture come into confrontation, and themes such as climate change are of implicit interest. While my work does not engage with the topic of climate change as a type of messaging, I am interested in the societal and cultural impact of these ideas and the conception that humanity can control nature or vice-versa. Aesthetically, I am mainly interested in the dissolution of space, perspective, light, and time through varying degrees of figuration where form is created through a responsive and adaptive process over a length of time. Colors and shapes are reworked until an ideal solution is found. The process itself mirrors the way time works – gradually shifting reality until what is familiar evolves into something renewed.” — Erik Nieminen