KunstenaarFinnish
Tuulikki Pietilä
1 actieve items
When Tuulikki Pietilä arrived in Paris in 1949 to study at the Fernand Leger Academy, she was already in her early thirties and had spent more than a decade working through the possibilities of printmaking in Finland and Sweden. Paris changed the direction of her colour work. From 1953 onward she began building multi-colour prints systematically: first lithographs in two to six colours, then woodcuts and serigraphs using up to twelve separate colour passes. The technical ambition was matched by a stylistic arc that moved from realism through cubist-influenced figuration to constructivism in the 1950s and freely gestural informalism in the 1960s.
Pietilä was born in Seattle on 18 February 1917, where her Finnish parents had emigrated, and returned with them to Finland as a child. She trained at the Turku School of Drawing from 1933 to 1936, then at the Finnish Art Association's drawing school in Helsinki from 1936 to 1940. After the war she studied at the University College of Arts, Crafts and Design in Stockholm between 1945 and 1949, before the Paris years that proved decisive. Her first solo exhibition had been held in Turku in 1951.
In 1955 she met Tove Jansson. The two became life partners and remained so until Jansson's death in 2001. Their relationship shaped both their lives without erasing their distinct practices - Pietilä's graphic art developed on its own terms throughout. She is widely believed to be the model for the character Too-Ticky in Jansson's Moomin books, the calm, practical figure who lives in the bathing house and keeps her knowledge to herself. Pietilä also made 43 three-dimensional pieces for what is now the Moomin Museum in Tampere.
From 1982 she held a professorship at the Academy of Fine Arts in Helsinki, where she had also been a student, training a generation of Finnish graphic artists. She wrote several books on printmaking technique. In 1963 she received the Order of the Lion of Finland. Near the end of her life she made a gift of extraordinary scope: more than 1,400 works bequeathed to the Ateneum Art Museum in Helsinki, which responded with a major retrospective exhibition. She died on 23 February 2009, five days after her 92nd birthday.
On the Nordic auction market, Pietilä's work circulates primarily through Finnish houses. Hagelstam and Co in Helsinki accounts for the largest share of her 23 lots in the Auctionist database, followed by Stockholms Auktionsverk Helsinki and Limhamns Auktionsbyrå. Her strongest result is a work titled "Flicka" at 2,076 EUR. Ceramics appear alongside prints in the auction record, reflecting the range of her practice. The majority of her lots are prints and engravings, with individual works in the 200-800 SEK range.