REIDAR SÄRESTÖNIEMI (1925-1981)
Porot ovat iltaa piilossa (The Reindeer are Hiding from the Night)
Details
REIDAR SÄRESTÖNIEMI (1925-1981)
Porot ovat iltaa piilossa (The Reindeer are Hiding from the Night)
signed and dated ‘68 Reidar Särestöniemi’ (lower edge); titled ‘POROT OVAT ILTAA PIILOSSA’ (on the stretcher)
oil on canvas
47¼ x 47¼in. (120 x 120cm.)
Painted in 1968
Porot ovat iltaa piilossa (The Reindeer are Hiding from the Night)
signed and dated ‘68 Reidar Särestöniemi’ (lower edge); titled ‘POROT OVAT ILTAA PIILOSSA’ (on the stretcher)
oil on canvas
47¼ x 47¼in. (120 x 120cm.)
Painted in 1968
Provenance
Private Collection, Pälkäne (acquired directly from the artist).
Acquired from the above by the present owner in 2004.
Acquired from the above by the present owner in 2004.
Literature
A. Koskamo and U. Viitanen (ed.), Reidar Särestöniemi, I Want to Express All as Colour, Rovaniemi 2025, p. 178 (illustrated in colour).
Exhibition
Rovaniemi, Rovaniemen taidemuseo, Reidar Särestöniemi 100 Years - Land of the Midnight Sun, 2025.
Further details
‘I make these images and hope that they give people something better. In them, I tell stories, like all artists do, of this world that we live in’ - Reidar Särestöniemi
Porot ovat ilta piilossa (The Reindeer are Hiding from the Night) (1968) is a vibrant, visionary painting by Reidar Särestöniemi, who is widely held to be the greatest Finnish-Lapland artist in history. In the saturated hues and dripping, richly layered textures typical of his mature work, Särestöniemi depicts a twilit landscape beneath a band of orange sky. The blue expanse is marbled with pink, turquoise and flashing yellow. Foliage hovers across the surface in thickets of scarlet impasto. A stand of trees—their trunks drawn with looping white strokes which glow beneath a wash of blue—are crowned with clouds of vaporous green. Across the lower edge, the artist has proudly signed his name in large, cursive purple script, incorporating his identity into the land itself.
Särestöniemi was born in 1925 on Särestö farm—from which the family took their name—outside the village of Kaukonen in Kittilä. In this remote part of Lapland, some 100km north of the Arctic Circle, they lived a self-sufficient lifestyle, fishing and hunting, caring for dairy cows, sheep, a horse and reindeer, and farming potatoes, barley and hay. There was no road to Särestö during the artist’s lifetime, meaning that visitors—and, later, his paintings—could only leave or arrive by river. After studying art in Helsinki and subsequently at the Ilya Repin Institute in Leningrad, Särestöniemi returned home in 1959, where he would remain for the rest of his life. Informed by leftist ideology and by the modern art he had encountered—particularly the expressive, heightened works of Chagall, Gauguin, Matisse and Picasso at the Hermitage Museum—he developed a unique idiom that celebrated the brilliance of Lapland’s natural world, and the place of its people within it.
Särestöniemi’s works were charged with a dreamlike, animist magic, and he saw himself as part of his homeland. He often depicted himself as a lynx or grouse. Other animal alter-egos, such as embracing seals and bears, have been seen to refer to his homosexuality, which he was forced to keep hidden. However mythic their colours and forms, however, his paintings were rooted in a nuanced attention to the living splendours of nature. Their distinctive dappled textures convey mosses, lichens, cloudberries, marsh tea and spruce, peatland and tundra; their radiance reflects the dramatic transformations of a place with eight distinct seasons, which is plunged into darkness during winter and whose midsummer sun never sets.
The artist’s sensitivity is on vivid display in the present work, which conjures a colour-drenched vista beneath a sunset strip of orange. Särestöniemi layers pigments into complex webs, washes and daubs, variously thick or dilute, resisting, veiling or merging with one another in a surface that teems with organic life. Comparable paintings made in the same year show what may be the same landscape in different weather conditions, seasons or times of day. Porotokka (Reindeer Herd), with a palette of turquoise, pinks, mottled greys and lichen-like orange, is dotted with the reindeer that here are hiding as night descends. Jänkä hehkuu (Glowing Peatland) closely echoes the present work, yet its vegetation has ignited into an inferno of orange, yellow and crimson, with contrasting cyan streaks shot through the sky.
By the time he painted the present work, Särestöniemi was a well-known figure in Finland and had found success abroad, with solo shows in Sweden, Germany and Luxembourg. During the early 1970s, at a time when hydroelectric work and other developments were threatening traditional ways of life in Lapland, he made paintings with increasingly overt ecological themes. Tragedy struck at the end of 1977, when his home and studio burnt down, destroying much of his art as well as his books, photographs and writings: only paintings that had been purchased by collectors or stored elsewhere survived. He died in 1981, aged fifty-six, and his reputation in Finland and worldwide has continued to rise over the ensuing years.
Porot ovat ilta piilossa (The Reindeer are Hiding from the Night) (1968) is a vibrant, visionary painting by Reidar Särestöniemi, who is widely held to be the greatest Finnish-Lapland artist in history. In the saturated hues and dripping, richly layered textures typical of his mature work, Särestöniemi depicts a twilit landscape beneath a band of orange sky. The blue expanse is marbled with pink, turquoise and flashing yellow. Foliage hovers across the surface in thickets of scarlet impasto. A stand of trees—their trunks drawn with looping white strokes which glow beneath a wash of blue—are crowned with clouds of vaporous green. Across the lower edge, the artist has proudly signed his name in large, cursive purple script, incorporating his identity into the land itself.
Särestöniemi was born in 1925 on Särestö farm—from which the family took their name—outside the village of Kaukonen in Kittilä. In this remote part of Lapland, some 100km north of the Arctic Circle, they lived a self-sufficient lifestyle, fishing and hunting, caring for dairy cows, sheep, a horse and reindeer, and farming potatoes, barley and hay. There was no road to Särestö during the artist’s lifetime, meaning that visitors—and, later, his paintings—could only leave or arrive by river. After studying art in Helsinki and subsequently at the Ilya Repin Institute in Leningrad, Särestöniemi returned home in 1959, where he would remain for the rest of his life. Informed by leftist ideology and by the modern art he had encountered—particularly the expressive, heightened works of Chagall, Gauguin, Matisse and Picasso at the Hermitage Museum—he developed a unique idiom that celebrated the brilliance of Lapland’s natural world, and the place of its people within it.
Särestöniemi’s works were charged with a dreamlike, animist magic, and he saw himself as part of his homeland. He often depicted himself as a lynx or grouse. Other animal alter-egos, such as embracing seals and bears, have been seen to refer to his homosexuality, which he was forced to keep hidden. However mythic their colours and forms, however, his paintings were rooted in a nuanced attention to the living splendours of nature. Their distinctive dappled textures convey mosses, lichens, cloudberries, marsh tea and spruce, peatland and tundra; their radiance reflects the dramatic transformations of a place with eight distinct seasons, which is plunged into darkness during winter and whose midsummer sun never sets.
The artist’s sensitivity is on vivid display in the present work, which conjures a colour-drenched vista beneath a sunset strip of orange. Särestöniemi layers pigments into complex webs, washes and daubs, variously thick or dilute, resisting, veiling or merging with one another in a surface that teems with organic life. Comparable paintings made in the same year show what may be the same landscape in different weather conditions, seasons or times of day. Porotokka (Reindeer Herd), with a palette of turquoise, pinks, mottled greys and lichen-like orange, is dotted with the reindeer that here are hiding as night descends. Jänkä hehkuu (Glowing Peatland) closely echoes the present work, yet its vegetation has ignited into an inferno of orange, yellow and crimson, with contrasting cyan streaks shot through the sky.
By the time he painted the present work, Särestöniemi was a well-known figure in Finland and had found success abroad, with solo shows in Sweden, Germany and Luxembourg. During the early 1970s, at a time when hydroelectric work and other developments were threatening traditional ways of life in Lapland, he made paintings with increasingly overt ecological themes. Tragedy struck at the end of 1977, when his home and studio burnt down, destroying much of his art as well as his books, photographs and writings: only paintings that had been purchased by collectors or stored elsewhere survived. He died in 1981, aged fifty-six, and his reputation in Finland and worldwide has continued to rise over the ensuing years.
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