Rannikko Pekka -vesa Biography
Vesa-Pekka Rannikko is an artist born in Turku in 1968 and currently residing in Helsinki, Finland. His art has been exhibited in many solo and group exhibitions, as well as international video art festivals, including at Kling & Bang Gallery in Reykjavik, Nordic de Lights in London, Sara Hildén Art Museum in Tampere, Kemper Art Museum of Kansas City in the United States, at the Galeri Lars Olsen in Copenhagen and in the Alvar Aalto museum in Jyväskylä. In 2011 he represented Finland at the Venice Biennale, while his works are included in numerous collections, such as those of the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma, the Helsinki City Art Museum and the Saastamoinen Foundation.
Rannikko has created many large-scale commissioned public works, most recently in Vantaa, Tuusula and Seinäjoki, proving himself to be a versatile artist working in painting, sculpture, video and installation. He is fascinated by the fragmented nature of narrative structure, various types of mediums, and the simultaneity of different types of texts. In particular, his abstract works seek to refer only to themselves and the process of making, while the figurative works, or "lying sculptures", raise questions about the work's relationship to reality, its subject matter and the linguistic nature of vision.
Video works and animations are characterized by associativity: combinations of the artificial structures of society, authentic experience and images related to nature. Sketch-like drawing and writing combine in stop motion imagery, where they form an organic, responsive and associative whole. In 2015, Rannikko won the State of Finland Prize for Fine Arts.
