About my working

For several years now, a recurring rule has guided my paintings: in my geometric compositions, there are always an equal number of horizontal and vertical rectangles. This rule functions both as a form of bounded freedom and as a way of structuring my observations, while also referencing the ideals of harmony and order in Western painting.

My works engage with the modernist ideal of universality, as well as questions related to control, rationality, and invisible social structures. I also understand geometric structures as a very everyday mode of thinking, one that carries a playful and narrative dimension.

However, the final form of my paintings emerges as an event rather than merely the result of a predetermined composition. In my process, I seek deviations and disruptions through which expression becomes humanized. In this sense, I also see my works as images of mental structures and of the idea of humanity. I am interested in how geometric composition has long traditions in the classification of worldly phenomena, and I consider abstract visual expression to be a phenomenon far older than modern art.

For me, painting is a form of visual thinking and a kind of material philosophy. In my works, I juxtapose different painterly approaches: clean, print-like gestures are set against tentative marks and thick impasto surfaces.

The materiality of painting introduces a necessary friction into an otherwise order-seeking structure. The painted surface thus becomes for me a bodily and sensory point of contact, rather than merely a readable, symbolic, or syntactic gesture. The form of the work is therefore never neutral, but the result of a negotiation between body, thought, and material.

Stig Baumgartner (b. 1969) has been exhibiting since 1995. Alongside his artistic practice, he is also a long-time lecturer in drawing and perception at the Academy of Fine Arts, the University of the Arts Helsinki. He completed his doctoral degree in 2015. Baumgartner's paintings are held in many of Finland's most prestigious collections, including Saastamoinen Foundation and the Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma.

Clean Mind, 2025, oil on canvas, 160 x 130 cm