Vickie Vainionpää: Tempest
Olga Korper Gallery
March 28 – April 25 2026
To enter Vickie Vainionpää’s Tempest is to find it already surging towards you: a line accelerating, doubling back, thinning to a filament and then flooding. Colour arrives in surges of ochre and rust. Blue cuts cold through hazes of white. Forms writhe and knot, swell with volume before tapering to nothing. Each form pulls against the others, crossing where they meet.
Vainionpää’s compositions begin in virtual reality, the body moving through three- dimensional space, drawing in air. From there the work passes through layers of digital texturing and filtering before arriving as pastel and oil on canvas. What appears untamed, its storm-like momentum, is meticulously orchestrated. Lines multiply, colours flare and fracture, forms swell and taper. These movements belong to the same systems whose accelerating momentum the paintings register. The forces these works hold are not something observed from afar; they form the atmosphere through which their marks move and take shape.
The tumult these paintings carry and the title they bear recall another: Shakespeare’s tempest, conjured deliberately, a world overturned and tentatively set right. He wrote Prospero as a man certain of his control, certain that the storm he raises will obey him. It does until it does not: what is conjured exceeds the hand that conjures it. Shakespeare’s Tempestmoves from upheaval to humility, and Vainionpää moves with it, finding in it what the present moment asks of us. Her paintings speak to a present that outpaces itself, where events move faster than they can be named or fully grasped. Something in this momentum is both exhilarating and unsettling. A trace of Prospero’s ambivalence stirs here. Vainionpää’s Tempest echoes a turbulence born of the inventions humanity has set loose, yet marked by the unease they may exceed the hands that first summoned them.
The series unfolds as a sequence of transformations. In the diptych The Tempest, tumult gathers into a dense field of crossings and collisions. Upheaval tightens the marks into heavier passages of colour. Betrayal carries the tension further, thick blues piercing through the surface. In Surrender, something shifts — the gestures begin to release, openings appearing between them. And in Humility, the tumult does not end so much as disperse: colour lifts away, spreading into softer passages of movement. What had gathered opens outward. Movement persists, but its pressure loosens.
Humility does not quiet the storm. It acknowledges that we remain within it.
Exhibition essay written by İrem Karaaslan.
