Alisa Lehtinen

Artist statement 

My work lives in the in-between. I'm drawn to contradiction: stillness that carries weight, softness that hides an edge, quiet that somehow reads as loud.

Working in dark, muted tones across still life, self-portraiture, and figurative painting, I don't set out to make something comfortable or something disturbing. I want the space between the two, where an object or a figure can feel both familiar and slightly unreachable, almost like a dream or a memory.

Personally, I've spent a lot of my life caught between spaces, and painting is how that stops feeling like a problem to solve. Instead of trying to find my place in the world, painting has become a way of centring the in-between itself, letting it be the place I work from rather than something to run from.