ArtistFinnish
Reidar Särestöniemi
0 active items
Born on 14 May 1925 at the Särestöniemi farm near Kaukonen village in Kittilä, some 100 kilometers north of the Arctic Circle, Reidar Särestöniemi grew up as the youngest of seven children in a remote Lappish landscape that would define his entire life and output. As a boy he was solitary and drawn to the natural world around him - the peatlands, fell birches, reindeer, lynx, and willow grouse that would later fill his canvases. The family eventually took its name from the farm itself.
He trained first at the Finnish Art Society's Drawing School in Helsinki from 1947 to 1951, then briefly at the Academy of Fine Arts, before spending three formative years at the Ilya Repin Institute in Leningrad from 1956 to 1959. Returning to Finland in 1959, he held his first solo exhibition in Helsinki that same year and discovered his mature voice: bold, uninhibited color applied in quantity and treated as raw material. He would pour pigment directly onto wet surfaces to crack them, scrape back through layers with a palette knife, tilt large canvases on the floor to give them color baths, and build up surfaces that recorded every physical gesture. He worked in a combination of oil and tempera throughout his career.
Särestöniemi spent virtually all of his adult life back at the farm where he was born, building two studios there and rarely leaving northern Finland except for study and exhibitions. The landscape around him was not background but subject - its colors, seasonal extremes, and mythological resonances drove his art. He painted the midnight sun, the frozen birch forest in winter light, bears, seals, and the Sámi people and their reindeer culture with a force that struck many contemporary viewers as jarring. His use of color was unusual enough in Finnish art of the 1960s and 1970s to attract sustained criticism, but it also earned him a devoted following and serious institutional attention.
The Didrichsen Art Museum in Helsinki built a close relationship with Särestöniemi, with its founders visiting his studio in Kittilä in 1968 and acquiring multiple works. The museum organized solo exhibitions with him in 1970, 1973, 1975, and 1978, and held a memorial exhibition in 1981. Works by Särestöniemi entered the Finnish National Gallery's Ateneum collection, where his painting "Redbearded Moor" (1970) remains part of the permanent holdings. President Urho Kekkonen, who had acquired several works from the artist, awarded him the title of professor in 1974. High-profile state visitors, including Spain's Crown Prince Juan Carlos, were flown by helicopter to his farm at Särestö.
Särestöniemi died at Kittilä on 27 May 1981, aged 56. The Särestöniemi Museum, opened in 1985, preserves his home, studios, and a permanent gallery at the original farm site. In 2025, the centenary of his birth was marked by a nationwide Reidar100 program with major exhibitions at the Didrichsen Art Museum, Rovaniemi Art Museum, and Taidekeskus Salmela, among others.
At auction, Särestöniemi's market is concentrated in Finland and Sweden, with Hagelstam and Co. and Bukowskis Helsinki together accounting for the majority of recorded sales. The top price on the Auctionist platform is the painting "Tähtisumu" (Stjärndimma), which sold for over 254,000 euros, with "Vy från Vesisaari" and "Läsande kvinna-Eva" also achieving six-figure sums in Swedish kronor. His prints and smaller works appear more frequently and at accessible price points, making him one of the few Finnish artists with both a broad secondary market and a track record of high-value sales at the leading Nordic houses.