Nastja Rönkkö
CakeShop

13 March - 18 April 2010

Nastja Rönkkö’s paintings, texts and performances are born from an aspiration to investigate imagery of personal desire and its relationship to the materiality of paint. The genesis of desire and its unconscious manifestations are considered through and within painterly traces, gestures and histories. The construct and nature of female subjectivity is at the core of her practice. Pictorial symbols or ideograms, as well as intuitively recurring motifs within Rönkkö’s work (eg horses, cakes, hair and breasts) embody and inform such thought processes. Perpetually uncertain of their true origin and the crux of meaning, these pictographs are not to be read as specific metaphors/metonyms, but perhaps elusive traces of ungraspable unconscious desires. Through transformability of languages, the obsessively repeated motifs frequently escape and subvert their own signification within the Symbolic.

Nastja Rönkkö graduated from Central Saint Martins College in 2008 and is currently doing her AHRC funded MFA at the Slade School of Fine Art. In summer 2010 has a solo show at tm-gallery in Helsinki, Finland. Recent group exhibitions include The Trouble with Women at the Menier Chocolate Factory, London in 2010 and Let’s Go Home, at SKA-I, Hamburg in 2009.