The Finnish modernist Elga Sesemann (1922–2007) was only 23 when she had her first solo show in Helsinki, garnering praise for her mastery of the palette knife and for an expressive style that drew comparisons to Helene Schjerfbeck and Edvard Munch, and continued to paint into the mid 1990s, showing work in almost 100 exhibitions in her lifetime. This is not to say that she had an easy life: her father died when she was 17, she spent years living without electricity or running water and in 1964 she lost her husband of 19 years – whom she had married during a solar eclipse – to cancer. Her work is full of empty rooms, unpeopled streets and an abiding sense of melancholy, informed in part by wartime memories of having to leave her birthplace of Vyborg, which the Soviets formally annexed in 1947. Sesemann’s reputation has only grown since her death and she is now the first subject in a series of shows that highlight 20th-century artists from the collection of the Finnish National Gallery (18 August–8 August 2027).
Find out more from the Ateneum Art Museum’s website.
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