Anniversary auctions at Bukowskis presenting Unto Koistinen

Painter and graphic artist, professor Unto Koistinen (1917–1994) was one of the foremost modernists in post-war Finland. The early works of Koistinen had interfaces with national expressionism, but soon his path led towards a completely unique form of expression. Koistinen’s work consisted of drawings, paintings and graphics.

From his early years on, Koistinen’s atmospheric landscapes and portraits had a strong sense of form and powerful colours. After the development phase in the 1950s he started to focus increasingly on depicting persons. In the 1960s he introduced cameo paintings with brown tones. The name refers to cameo jewellery. Koistinen got the inspiration from Italy, where he had studied old frescos. In these paintings, female figures, depicted with delicate lines, shine translucently against a dark background. Despite their incompleteness, the female figures are pictured as monumental and idolised.

Blue Girl, finished in 1975, represents Koistinen’s later period. At this stage, the atmosphere in paintings depicting women became increasingly devout, and their exemplars were to be found more distinctively in the past, in the female figures of the antique and the Renaissance.