by Carl Kruse
The Carl Kruse Arts Blog invites its readership to the latest exhibition of artist (and blog friend) Helena Kauppila in Berlin, sponsored by ZEITGEIST Asset Management to take place 5pm on October 8 at the ZEITGEIST office on Kurfürstendam 52.
To celebrate the opening of its new Berlin office and support Berlin-based artistic practice, ZEITGEIST presents The Whole is Elsewhere, an exhibition of 25 works by Helena.
Bringing together paintings from several ongoing series, the exhibition explores color, complexity, and the ways individuals become part of larger systems. Sometimes what is missing isn’t another piece of information. It is another way of looking. The Whole is Elsewhere begins with this idea.
We know that a brain is made of neurons, yet the experience of consciousness seems to belong to something more than any one of them. A flock of birds can move as a coherent whole without a single bird directing it. Again and again, individual parts come together and something appears that cannot be found in the parts alone. New ways of thinking about complex systems are making old questions about connection and agency newly strange: Where does agency reside? What belongs to the individual, and what emerges only through the whole? Kauppila approaches these questions through painting, asking how individuals participate in the larger systems containing them.
Kauppila’s paintings begin with lived experience: walking and dancing in parks, watching the light change at sunrise, encountering trees, people, weather, and color. Science enters the work not to explain these experiences, but to shift the perspective and allow something outside the artist’s own perception to enter. In Spring, the physical energy of spring meets the structure of a gene associated with cellular energy; in Symphony in a Park, accumulated experiences of birdsong and movement become a field of individual elements forming a larger whole. Across the exhibition, intellectual and physical ways of experiencing the world are allowed to coexist. The Whole is Elsewhere is ultimately less about finding answers than about remaining attentive to what cannot be located in a single part or attributed to a single cause. A decision may begin before the moment in which it is made; an experience may shape us before we consciously understand it; the life of a park or a city arises through countless individual interactions. The paintings make space for this uncertainty—and for the wonder of being alive within systems we can experience deeply without ever understanding completely.
Helena Kauppila is a Berlin-based visual artist, born in London and raised in Finland and the United States, whose work brings together painting, mathematics, science, and lived experience. She holds a Ph.D. in mathematics from Columbia University and a B.S. with Honors from the California Institute of Technology, and studied painting at the Art Students League of New York, where she received the Reginald Marsh and Felicia Meyer Marsh Scholarship. Her work has been presented at institutions including the Finnish Institute in Germany, the Max Planck Institute for Human Development, the Miettinen Collection, and Kunsthalle Brennabor, and she has participated in an artist residency with iKSV in Istanbul.
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