1959 born in Tampere (Finland)
1981 Move to Switzerland
since 2008 freelance artist
lives and works in the Bern region (CH)

For more than twenty years, Finnish-born Leena Zihlmann-Kaasalainen has been engaged in creative processes in painting, where she has tried out various techniques and, among other things, artistically processed the impressions of various longer journeys. Her paintings are created in an intensive, meditative process and open references to her Finnish roots, but also to Asia and last but not least to her current close living environment.

The pictures are created lying on the floor, with pigments applied layer by layer by hand and which retain their special materiality through this special technique. Blue and grey tones, white and black play a central role in these approaches to nature. The pictures, which are primarily intended to capture and reproduce moods, seem like poems that gently touch the soul when viewed over a longer period of time.

A special feature of her work are small picture boxes with black side walls. The works on their front side are not simply applied to the wooden boxes; they are rather carved, scratched, imprinted on the wood as they were previously impressed on the artist’s work. Because of the small format, these works have something very intimate about them. Something that reminds one of personal notes, diary entries, messages about sensitivities, self-awareness or questions of being.

They are landscapes of the soul that Leena Zihlmann-Kaasalainen brings before our eyes. Landscapes of feeling, which, even in a small format, speak of enormous forces that are at work beneath the possibly very calm surface of the physical. Her seemingly landscape-like abstractions are an expression of the hidden inner life; of that which eludes the eye.