About Alexandra Koskinen

My name is Alexandra Koskinen, I am a 25 year old Finnish Peruvian artist and curator currently based in Helsinki. I graduated from the University of the Arts London in 2021 with a degree in fine arts specialising in painting and recently completed my Master’s at Aalto University in Visual Cultures, Curating and Contemporary Art Theory (ViCCA). As an artist, researcher and curator I float between close fields of interest. Through my practice I seek to use the human form as a means to process the strangeness and absurdity of the collective human experience. Embedded with themes of morality, memory and (cultural) identity, I explore the edges of what we define as shared consciousness through distortions and surreal transformations of my subjects, in the hopes of encouraging self reflection. I work primarily with oil paint and relief printing but dabble into glass sculptures, as well as video performance, always heavily relying upon text based work as a foundation for my images; pursuing the recollection, resurfacing and redesign of known narratives. 

My practice in itself consists of surrealist images, with interconnected but different themes that vary from year to year. I have explored my personal relationships with Alzheimer's disease and its psychological and physiological effects on the body as an edifice. Transformed different cultural proverbs into visual imagery and expanded upon their moral resonance in society. I have also unravelled the repression and objectification of women in the domestic setting, while looking at gendered romantic languages, like Spanish and French. My latest line of work is defined by a focus on childhood; revolving around ideas of birth and rebirth, imagination, play, loss of innocence, identity, societal expectations, gender roles and peer pressure. Underlined with eeriness that appears in grotesque or ironic distortions of reality, the work strives for a retrospective look homeward that is nostalgic and sentimental, yet strange.