Sue Scott Gallery is pleased to announce Flex, a solo exhibition of new work by Kirsi Mikkola, a Finnish born artist residing in Berlin.

For her first solo exhibition at Sue Scott Gallery, Mikkola will present a new series of densely compressed abstract constructions made from cut and painted paper. Mikkola attracted international attention in the early 1990s for her provocative, figurative sculptures. This exhibition will debut a new direction for her work.

Each one of her jewel-like constructions is a relentless negotiation of spatial pushing and pulling that takes years to complete and exhibits a nearly religious devotion to the hand-made. The result of this process is a personal archeology of an artist’s preoccupation with time, looking and the necessity of creation. The elaborate weaving of patterns and coils speak to both the currency of labor and introspection and similarly reward the viewer with close, private study.

In this installation, intimate, human and large-scale works are arranged in dialogue with one another. Rhythms range from harmonious to staccato. The works are highly constructed but also organic, recalling imagery as varied as streambeds, cityscapes, constellations, the cosmos and fractals, the self-similar repetition of shapes one sees in clouds, lightening bolts, and coast lines. The linear elements take the viewer from one space to another. Filigree feeds back on itself while geometric shapes offer directions guiding or pulling the viewer through the composition—roads to water or vortex into the calm.

Simultaneously explosive and organized, the works could lay claim to various sources: the obsessive slowness of Ivan Albright, the feverish magic of James Siena or Paul Klee’s negotiation of abstraction. The expressive boldness of Odilon Redon and the unyielding attitude of Henri Matisse also come to mind.

Kirsi Mikkola was born in 1959, in Helsinki, Finland and graduated from Hochschule der Künste, Berlin. She has work in the permanent collections of the Norton Simon Museum, Pasadena, CA, Berlinische Galerie, Martin-Gropius-Bau and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki, among others.