Biography

Ulla Karttunen is a Finnish contemporary artist whose practice operates at the intersection of the philosophical and the visual. Active internationally, having lived in Paris and Italy, Karttunen works within the "phygital" space—the liminal territory between the physical and the digital—creating socially engaged, boundary-pushing projects alongside deeply poetical esoteric art.

A multidisciplinary visual artist focused on digital mixed media, installation, and socially critical projects, she has been recognized as a digital art pioneer, having created digital paintings across four decades since the 1990s. Karttunen has exhibited widely across Europe and the Americas, with numerous museum and gallery exhibitions, as well as art fairs in cities such as New York, Rome, London, Paris, Berlin, Florence, Miami, Bologna, Los Angeles, Basel, Leipzig, Ljubljana and Rio de Janeiro.

Karttunen’s work is a radical fusion of pop art, the Baroque, the avant-garde, and mystical theology. Her art is characterized by exuberant, colorful, and surreal imagery in which sacred or mythical themes merge with elements that are mundane and sweet, or darkly passionate and Gothic. Critics have described her work as ‘horribly beautiful, even sacred-like,’ ‘seductive and enchanting, appealing to all the senses—but also, and especially—the intellect,’ and 'timeless and philosophical visual poetry and Dionysian art, seamlessly merging a sensual, satirical, and irrational approach'.

Her portraits capture rebellious fatal women, unknown female saints, and mystics in states of ecstatic passion. Her ephemeral sculptures and esoteric digital icons confront transience, mortality, élan vital, and rapture with unflinching intensity. In her installations and paintings, she has employed shockingly unconventional, banal materials, such as toilet paper, nail polish or ketchup, to critique consumer society, patriarchal values, violence against women, and social inequality. She has constructed a 7-meter-high sumptuous patron saint from toilet paper—a work that won an international art prize on contemporary taboos and traveled from museums and art centers to a Baroque church and an oriental princess's tower in the National Museum of Algeria. Karttunen’s career has also included various collaborative, dialogical, unofficial, or underground art initiatives, such as establishing an alternative, nomadic gallery in her Parisian bedroom.

Among her honors, Ulla Karttunen received a five-year artist grant in 2015, an international art prize in 2016, and was awarded a state artist pension in 2020. Three art books on her work have been published, and numerous articles about her art have appeared in significant books and journals. She has also contributed approximately 200 essays, and worked as a critic, curator, designer, and researcher, lecturing internationally on aesthetics, the philosophy of art, and the sociology of art.

Artist Statement

Paradoxically, I create visual art from the invisible. I deal with what is inconceivable and too fatal to be grasped. The mystic’s passion lies where the pursuit of truth meets ecstasy and suffering.

My art dissolves the basic dichotomy between the sensual and the sacred, between flesh and spirit. For me, art is an alchemical process that filters the present to timelessness. It is the freest, most non-conformist way to re-evaluate values.

I have rejected digital art as mere technological play and pushed it towards more profound levels—towards the sensual, the symbolic, the meditative, the mystical, and the neobaroque. My practice is defined by an explorative and innovative use of media, combining manual methods of drawing, painting, and tearing with digital techniques to create ecstatic imagery: glowing pastel shades and darker tones of mystical intensity.

My artistic lineage runs through Rumi, Blake, Voltaire, Novalis, Rimbaud, and Rilke. My philosophical blood flows from Nietzsche's artist-philosopher, Plotinus's ek-stasis and union with the One, and the Continental thought of Bataille, Blanchot, Derrida, Deleuze, and Levinas. I draw from Hilma af Klint's esoteric visions, St. Theresa of Avila's divine ecstasy, Caravaggio's passionate reds, and the Gothic and Baroque chapels that house humanity's most profound spiritual strivings.

As a philosophical alchemist, or as a mystic outside of religions, I am an atheist, agnostic, critic of power structures, and mystic all at once. My spirituality is one of silence, sensuality, the sun, the darkness of the night, and the poetry of everyday life. My works celebrate the paradisiacal and oversweet tones of joy and femininity, but also the deeply intense, darker nuances of a mystic's passion and transience.

A work of art is an embodiment not only of thought, but of the entire carnal existence. Art is prayer, protest, and passion; art offers colors that dazzle, themes that disturb, and beauty that blinds. My art exists to remind that art is not decoration, it is transformation.

Website: https://www.ullakarttunen.com/
Exhibition blog: https://ullakarttunen.wordpress.com/
Professional artists' register in Finland: https://kuvataiteilijamatrikkeli.fi/en/artist/ulla-karttunen#bio
Articles and artist features:
https://aatonau.com/ulla-karttunen-pioneering-perspectives-in-contemporary-art/
https://fineartsnews.com/2026/06/ulla-karttunen-the-alchemical-artist-sculpting-the-divine-from-the-mundane/
https://circle-arts.com/member/ulla-karttunen/
https://www.romecentral.com/en/donna-fatale-il-racconto-visivo-filosofico-di-ulla-karttunen-dalla-finlandia-allitalia-al-museo-crocetti-di-roma/