Riitta Rönkkö – Second Sight

Riitta Rönkkö – Second Sight is a retrospective exhibition that delves into the different stages of the artist’s career and the diversity of her work. The exhibition is on view at KUMMA from 7 November 2026 to 31 January 2027.

For Riitta Rönkkö (1951–2025), art was a way of living, experiencing, seeing and making sense of the world. She lived through art and for art. A postmodernist who championed individuality, she built her career on her own terms, developed techniques of her own and drew inspiration from high culture, kitsch and the everyday world around her. Rönkkö was part of a generation of radical Kuopio artists whose expressive work attracted national attention in the 1980s.

The exhibition traces the diverse work of Riitta Rönkkö, an artist who forged her own path, from the beginning of her career to its final years. The series on display lead visitors through the successive phases of her practice and reveal her characteristic way of working in series. Rönkkö would typically devote around a decade to a particular technique and theme. This sustained process resulted in bodies of work that brought her personal experiences together with influences from mythology, art history and fairy tales. Her work was distinguished by close observation and an ability to see things differently.

Fearless experimentation with materials was central to Riitta Rönkkö’s art. Her large, drawing-like paintings on crumpled paper from the 1980s gave way in the 1990s to works combining photography with a paper-casting technique of her own invention. Around the turn of the millennium, she began creating light drawings that glowed in darkened spaces. Porcelain arrangements presented Rönkkö with an artistic challenge that she continued to explore until the final years of her life.

The retrospective was developed in collaboration with Riitta Rönkkö and completed together with her son, Tatu Rönkkö, who also created the exhibition’s soundscape.