Jarmo Mäkilä

Rauma-born Jarmo Mäkilä (b. 1952) ranks among Finland’s most acclaimed living artists. He is a creative forerunner who has boldly walked his own path in contemporary art. His work has been exhibited widely around the world.

For the past twenty years, Mäkilä has been exploring the world of his childhood: through painting, he seeks answers to haunting, unanswered questions. His art is narrative in style and many-layered in content. Every detail has a deeper meaning beyond what we see on the canvas, suggesting worlds that lie in hiding behind the surface of things.

This book is a work of autofiction in which Mäkilä delves deeper into the reality from which his paintings emanate. The texts and accompanying paintings return to the landscapes of his childhood during the postwar reconstruction era in Finland. Who is the little boy in the stories, and where is he now? How does the world look through the eyes of a young boy in 1950s Finland? At what point does childhood end?

This book produced by Rauma Art Museum marks the 50^th anniversary of Mäkilä’s painting career and it accompanies his exhibition of the same name to be hosted by Rauma Art Museum in the summer of 2024.