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Biography
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Markus HEIKKERÖ
Born 1952 in Helsinki, Finland. Lives and works in Helsinki.
Markus Heikkerö's utopia was a society of total freedom that would permit an inner life rising from the deepest recesses of the mind. The worlds created by Heikkerö are related to underground art and Surrealism, although commitment to any one school is foreign to his aims: "The core of my art is emotion, it is emotion that I must capture in my pictures, to give it to the viewer."
Biography
Markus Heikkerö began his artistic career in the underground movement. He made posters and paintings, and played drums in the underground band The Sperm. Heikkerö's paintings were exhibited for the first time in 1968, and the following year he began studying at the Free Art School in Helsinki. Heikkerö's first exhibited works were Surrealistic fantasy landscapes, whose open sexuality, and especially their phallic motif, gave rise to angry demands for censorship. During the years that followed, Heikkerö's paintings were exhibited at several exhibitions in Helsinki, Lahti, Lappeenranta, and Jyväskylä.
A long break followed, during which the focus in Heikkerö's work shifted for a number of years from painting to designing posters and, above all, record covers. In the 1970s, Heikkerö played not only in The Sperm, but also in Haikara, a band based in Lahti. From 1976-78, he was the soloist and drummer in the rock band Sleepy Sleepers. Markus Heikkerö studied at the University of Art and Design Helsinki UIAH, from 1976-80, graduating as a graphic artist.
It was not until 1986 that Heikkerö returned to the public eye. By now, he had adopted a new imagery and technique. The clearly figurative themes of his works, painted with a spray technique, ranged from the Seven Brothers of Aleksis Kivi to Marilyn Monroe. In 1999, the Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma featured new paintings from Heikkerö made in the 1990s. In them, Heikkerö used colours in an expressionistic way and employed the fantasy landscapes familiar from his early work.
Markus Heikkerö has worked as a teacher and lecturer in several art institutes, as well as abroad. He is a member of the Finnish Painters' Union, Helsinki Artists' Association, and Muu ry.
Article
From Underground to the Heavens and Back
Heikkerö's paintings Pegasoksen salaliitto (Pegasus' Conspiracy), Mikki-hiiren 40-vuotisjuhlat (Mickey Mouse's 40th Anniversary) and Aku masturboi (Donald Masturbates) were created from 1969-70. At that time, Markus Heikkerö was a young man of 17 who had just started his art studies. The works were, thus, created at the very beginning of his artistic career, and featured in his early public exhibitions. Both powerful and challenging, they aroused confusion, vague disgust, or admiration, depending on the viewer. The people or creatures in them were foreign, yet at the same time familiar: some kind of vaguely human creatures accompanied by lively Mickey Mouse and good old flat-billed Donald Duck. The landscapes and scenes are from another reality, full of wildly imaginative action. Their open sexuality was striking. The works depict a continuous, greedy act that binds the figures together. Gigantic phalluses fly around the sky or rise up from the waves.
The Realm of Dream and Eros
In Pegasus' Conspiracy , Heikkerö moves in the landscape of Greek mythology. The mythical winged horse, Pegasus, which sprang from the blood of Medusa, has in Heikkerö's work become a phallus. According to the myth, Bellerophon angered Zeus by attempting to fly with Pegasus to Heaven. Zeus sent a gadfly to sting Pegasus, whereupon the horse threw its rider and galloped alone to the heavens, where Zeus captured it and placed it permanently among the constellations. Pegasus was the horse of the Muses, and a kick from its hoof created the Hippocrene fountain, whose waters inspired poetry. The Pegasus in Heikkerö's mythic world carries in its front legs a spermatozoon, the origin of life, while incomprehensible figures bustle around a female torso lying on the ground. The earth opens up into blue space, the dark skies open, revealing a heavenly observer - Zeus, who has assumed the guise of an Eastern divinity, perhaps?
The Surrealists, such as André Breton, from whom Heikkerö got his inspiration, longed for and celebrated the "reality of the night" - the world of dreams, eroticism, and creative fantasy. The mind of the dreamer is free, he ceases to be a plaything of his memory. In the dream world, the organising and confining force of memory is not present; in dreams, there are no restricting commands or expectations. Everything is possible. In the late 1960s, these same ideas were entertained by the hippie movement, which aimed at a total revolution. Political revolutions change nothing, what is needed is an inner, mental revolution that leads to artistic, psychedelic, and sexual liberation.
Heikkerö opens up a world to us that we should not look at, expecting it to offer a one-on-one realistic rendering of that which exists. Rather, this psychedelic and surreal fantasy world is about the inner turmoil of an artist and a talented young man, about emotions welling up from the subconscious and their almost physical eruption. The work offers viewers an opportunity to discover their own feelings, but, because of its intensity, the work is also easily rejected. Indeed, it is rejection that may turn the work in the viewer's eyes into something provocative, offensive, indecent. Heikkerö denies that he sought to create a scandal: the purpose of art is to liberate man, not to control him.
New Pranks by the Cartoon Hero
In Donald Masturbates and Mickey Mouse's 40th Anniversary , Heikkerö used cartoon characters in a new way. To the familiar and inoffensive duck world of the whole family, he added an incongruous element, sexuality. The issue of Donald Duck's trousers - whether a children's comic character should wear pants or not - was arousing discussion at the same time, as Heikkerö's Donald with its huge protuberance was met with a demand for censorship. The demand that an age limit for school children should be imposed on the work was, thus, not very surprising, although today's viewers may find it amusing.
The comic characters in Heikkerö's work allude both to Pop art and its imagery borrowed from popular culture, and to underground art with its aim of dismantling the norms of mainstream culture. Underground comics were born in the 1960s as a reaction against the Comic Code of 1954, which defined the limits of propriety for comics published in the press. The themes and idiom of underground comics were blunt and struck a blow at the core of the consumer society - money, morals, patriotism, and the family. Heikkerö has transferred something of the spirit and imagery of underground comics to his duck pictures. He has integrated them with a surrealistic landscape, but has also added his own touch, a softness and an elegance.
Maritta Mellais