Pekka and Sirkka Paikkari

Pekka Paikkari is a Helsinki-based ceramic artist known for his wall-mounted stoneware reliefs and monumental public installations. Paikkari’s compositions combine intentionality with entropy; they are produced through an aleatory process in which drying clay, sculpted and incised, splinters along chance rifts and is subsequently reassembled. His works are characterized by bifurcating lines and chalky, near monochrome hues which reveal the stark poetry of the icy Finnish landscape. Paikkari uses everyday objects as tools—bricks, dinner forks, gardening rakes, mops, and brooms—to carve indents and striations into flattened slabs of clay. Following a prolonged process of drying, the surface is exquisitely marked, inlaid with a web of linear patterns and natural fissures, which Paikkari complicates through expressionistic washes of paint and aluminum oxide.

Paikkari studied at the Kuopio Academy of Design and has been a member of the Arabia Art Department Society since 1983. He was awarded the first prize at the International Ceramic Biennale in Manises, Spain, and received the 1993 Faenza Biennial of Ceramics Prize from the Fondazione Cassa di Risparmio. His work is included in many prestigious museum collections including the British Museum and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, the Museu de la Ceràmica, Barcelona, and the Shigaraki Museum of Contemporary Ceramic Art in Japan, among others.