Vilho Lampi

Vilho Lampi spent almost his entire short life in Liminka, a farming district on the flat coast of northern Finland. He trained at the Finnish Academy of Fine Arts in Helsinki in the early 1920s, then returned to the family farm, where painting had to be won against the labour of the fields.

He is remembered above all for his self-portraits, which look back with a hard, searching defiance, and for his pictures of the wide Liminka bay and the plain people around him. In roughly 14 years he made more than 550 works, moving restlessly between expressionism and the cooler, sharp-edged manner known as New Objectivity.

The strain between his calling and his circumstances never eased. In March 1936 Lampi took his own life in the Oulu river at the age of 37. A museum in Liminka now holds his work in the place that had filled nearly all of it.