ArtistFinnish
Lasse Marttinen
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Lasse Marttinen was born on September 25, 1926, in Helsinki, into a Finland that was navigating its way through rapid social and cultural change. He trained at the Finnish Academy of Fine Arts from 1946 to 1948 and simultaneously at the Free Art School from 1947 to 1949 - a dual foundation that shaped both his technical range and his curiosity about the boundaries between fine art and other forms of creative practice.
Those other practices were not incidental. Through the late 1940s and into the mid-1950s, Marttinen worked as a musician, and from 1955 to 1960 as a stage designer, bringing a sense of composition and spatial arrangement to his visual art that would remain visible throughout his career. During the 1940s he also served as editor-in-chief of the youth magazine Kimmo, for which he drew two comic strips. This range across disciplines, unusual for the time, gave his painterly work a grounding in storytelling and visual communication.
In 1953, Marttinen was among the founders of the Brondan vinti artist group, which brought together Finnish painters in a spirit of inquiry that ran counter to the more conservative currents in Finnish art at the time. The group operated until 1959, and its years of activity corresponded with a period in which Marttinen established the subject matter and painterly approach he would refine across subsequent decades: landscapes of the Finnish capital and its surroundings, still lifes, and portraits, handled with attentiveness to atmosphere and natural light.
In 1968, he founded the Espoo Art School (Espoon Taidekoulu), where he both taught and directed activities for many years, contributing directly to the development of arts education in the greater Helsinki region. His serigraphs from the 1980s - including 'Sirkus Finland' and 'Ilmasirkus', produced in numbered editions - show his willingness to engage with printmaking and popular formats alongside his oil painting practice. Marttinen died on November 28, 2007, in Espoo. His paintings are held in collections at the Tampere Museum of Contemporary Art, the Amos Anderson Art Museum, the Oulu Art Museum, and the Nelimarkka Museum.