‘Before the light fades’
James Tottman
“In a world shaped by complexity and noise, I choose to focus on simplicity, subtle sensations, and the moments when we simply exist.” The exhibited series of James’s luminous figurative oil paintings is about the fleeting moments of joy in life, introduced through natural light and his signature flowing lines.
James Tottman (b.1986) is a British artist best known for his figurative oil paintings with distinctive flowing lines and a strong sense of human presence.
Warm welcome to the opening on Thursday, 6 August, from 17 to 21 💙
6 - 16.8
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The Memory of the Herd
Jevgenia Vassiljeva
23.7 - 2.8
The Memory of the Herd is a blue world built around animals, inherited memory and ancient instincts.
This exhibition is about what lives inside us instinctively: fear, courage, direction, belonging, and the invisible knowledge we receive from those who came before us.
Jevgenia Vassiljeva (loovart) is a contemporary artist based in Tallinn, Estonia. Her work is centred on large-scale acrylic paintings of animals and symbols.
Warm welcome to the opening on Thursday, 23 July, from 17 to 21 💙
Bodies, Bodies, Bodies
Group exhibition
Warm welcome to the opening of Bodies, Bodies, Bodies art exhibition on Thursday, 9 July, from 17 to 21 💙 Let’s celebrate bodies!
Let’s celebrate
Bodies that ache.
Bodies full of life.
Bodies that remember.
Bodies that crave.
Bodies that carry countless histories.
We look forward to seeing you!
9 - 19.7
Planetary Methods
Solo exhibition by Hassi
Memory is not always honest or complete. It changes every time we touch it. Like a memory, each painting has its own weather, its own rules, its own method. Planetary Methods is a collection of paintings based on memories from Hassi’s childhood until today. Hassi is a Moroccan Helsinki-based artist and mathematician who often combines painting, photography, and conceptual installations to reveal unseen layers of reality.
Warm welcome to the opening on Thursday, 25 June, from 17 to 21 💙
The evening will also mark the gallery’s first anniversary - come to celebrate these two very special occasions with us! We look forward to sharing this moment with you.
25.6 - 5.7
Beginning
Group exhibition
Join us in exploring the thorny paths of new beginnings.
This exhibition approaches beginning as a realization about oneself that becomes impossible to ignore and as the decision to act from this recognition. Even when it unsettles what others expect or are used to seeing.
A beginning contains uncertainty, instability, grief and resistance before offering a sense of ease, alignment and relief. Why do we always desire a new beginning at all? Why do we keep starting over?
Warm welcome to the opening on Thursday, 11 June, from 17 to 21 💙
11.6 - 21.6
RESONANCE: Anatomy of Dialogue
Group exhibition
Welcome to an exhibition where everything speaks twice! It even opens twice! RESONANCE: Anatomy of Dialogue is an exhibition built as a series of carefully set duets of art forms. The exhibition draws out exchanges between art forms, materials, and sensory experience.
Curated by Katia Los / @artishok_me
Pre-opening: Wednesday, 27 May | 17 - 21 💙
Official opening: Thursday, 28 May | 17 - 21 💙
27.5 - 7.6
Practices of Ideation
Group exhibition
Practices of Ideation considers ideation as an ongoing, evolving process and a way of thinking. It brings attention to the processes through which ideas are formed, adjusted, and reconfigured.
Practices of Ideation addresses what is overlooked. Artists are in a constant battle to stay open and flexible, as keeping ideation active requires elasticity - allowing for detours, delaying the result, reinventing established frameworks, combining unrelated references, and questioning assumptions.
Warm welcome to the opening on Thursday, 14 May, from 17 to 21 💙
14.5 - 24.5
Echoes
Alexandra Raita
Alexandra Raita's exhibition presents artworks that preserve the force of the first impulse, which keeps echoing within us throughout our lives.
Raita's works hold onto the rawness of their starting point, becoming less about depiction and more about presence, sensation, and immediacy. Working with acrylic, oil pastel, and spray paint, Raita draws from impulses that are direct and unfiltered.
Warm welcome to the opening on Thursday, 30 April, 17-21 💙
30.4 - 10.5
Silent World
Ajla Selenić
The most profound, pure and truthful inner world of a human being, as well as the entire life experience, mostly remains hidden, unknown or unexpressed to the outside world.
The exhibition deepens the focus on the sensibility of human inner being and its existential awareness as an insight into an inner, contemplative, silent world and a reflection of the invisible layeredness within human soul.
Warm welcome to the opening on Thursday, 16th April, 17-21 💙
16.4 - 26.4
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Rooting
Group exhibition
How do the unseen systems in our lives carry us forward?
The exhibition explores how roots - material, psychological, and relational - hold and sustain us. Largely unseen, these hidden systems emerge in fragments of memory, in the weight of displacement, in the persistence of connections formed across places and time.
Warm welcome to the opening on Thursday, 2 April, 17-21 💙
2.4 - 12.4
Breakdown
Group exhibition
Discover what usually remains hidden from public view.
Behind the scenes, every artist faces periods when work slows down, loses direction, or stops altogether. Methods that once felt reliable begin to fail, ideas repeat, and confidence in the process weakens. These moments rarely enter public view, while Breakdown presents art created during such turbulent periods.
Warm welcome to the opening on Thursday, 19th February 17-21 💙
19.3 - 29.3
Fluidity
Group exhibition
Fluidity approaches identity as an ongoing construction, continuously shaped by experience, memory, and connection. The self is not presented as stable or fixed, but as responsive and situational, formed through encounters and altered through time.
Who we are cannot be reduced to a single definition; instead, identity remains in motion, capable of holding contradiction, overlap, and revision.
Warm welcome to the opening on Thursday, 5 March, 17-21 💙
5.3 - 15.3
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Neon Night Cities
Minna Ristolainen
"For years, I have dreamt of the same city, a place I have never actually visited. In my dreams, I always visit this city at night, in the twilight. The city is glowing, colourful, and situated on a slope by the sea."
The works in the "Neon Night Cities" exhibition aim to crystallize the atmosphere and landscapes of this dream city. All the works depict a place that the artist has only visited in her imagination.
Warm welcome to the opening on Thursday, 19th February 17-21 💙
19.2 - 1.3
Where feelings have no name
Group exhibition
Do you ever get confused by what you feel?
The exhibition is about emotional states a person cannot clearly identify, name, or fully understand. These feelings are mixed, unstable, and difficult to locate, existing without a clear cause or resolution.
Warm welcome to the opening on Thursday, 5th February 17-21 💙
5.2 - 15.2
Still In Color
Sonia Anker
Color doesn't forsake suddenly; it slowly fades unnoticed until you forget it was ever vivid. Years pass in work, in care, in responsibility, while art holds its breath in silence. Years and years later, color begins to occupy space again. It sharpens breath and straightens thought. It expands, filling the field of vision, becoming impossible to ignore. The familiar heaviness of blue Mondays begins to loosen its grip.
22.1 – 1.2
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A Blue Dream Xperience, LUX Helsinki
This January, The Blue Verve is taking part in Lux Helsinki, Finland’s beloved festival of light. We are preparing something special to contribute to the city’s glowing winter nights and invite you to experience it with us.
A Blue Dream is a two-room immersive installation, created by visual artists DonKalervo, Sido, and light artist Aleksei Vdonin.
6.1 – 18.1
Hearty
We are delighted to present our next group exhibition, Hearty, opening on Thursday, 11th December, at The Blue Verve 💙 Visit us and discover how our artists see a hearty presence, or its absence.
December in Finland arrives with its endless nights. The days retreat, the air sharpens, and though the season carries holidays and rituals, it can also feel like the loneliest time of the year. Silence thickens, snow covers the familiar, and the heart begins to long for something near - a hearty presence, a voice, the closeness of another.
11.12 – 21.12
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“Through the facets of m/y eyes I have no unitary vision of your body”
We warmly invite you to join us for the opening of Liisa Mudist's exhibition on Thursday, 27th November.
The exhibition presents a series of recent painted self-portraits. Each work originates from a photograph: images from family albums, snapshots from the artist’s phone, or found photographs circulating online. The series focuses on the act of seeing and the unstable relationship between the one who looks and the one who is looked at, especially when both positions belong to the same person.
"i choose a photo that shows me how i see myself. how i perceive my soul to be. i choose the photo and copy that which was a moment i will never get back. but through painting it, i re-live this impossibility. re-live this little piece of a second, the moment gone forever."
27.11 – 7.12
Fleeting group exhibition
We warmly invite you to join us for the opening of the Fleeting group exhibition. Discover what our artists have to reveal about what never fully became.
There are moments that arrive without warning,
subtle and elusive.
Not dramatic, not grand -
just a shift in the air, a glance too long,
the stillness after someone leaves.
6.11 – 16.11
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Horsegirl exhibition by Eeva Paavela
We warmly invite you to join us for the opening of Horsegirl, a solo exhibition by Eeva Paavela, exploring the experience of being driven beyond oneself.
The title Horsegirl is a term commonly used as a dismissive description of preteen girls; it is a rather awkward phase, a site of tension between the innocence of childhood, growing self-awareness, and social conditioning.
23.11 – 2.11
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Exhale exhibition
We are delighted to present “Exhale,” an exhibition featuring the paintings of The Blue Verve co-founders, Ekaterina Myllykoski and Veronika Gramotina.
Do you remember to exhale something you no longer need? Some memories stay long after their purpose has ended. They settle behind the ribs, rewiring how we move, speak, and understand ourselves. "Exhale" describes the moment the body stops carrying what memory has pressed into it.
9.10 – 19.10
Faces group exhibition
What do faces think when we are not looking? The exhibition explores faces as shifting surfaces. Coded, layered, and never fully available to the eye.
The face is both mask and mirror: a surface shaped to conceal and a surface that inevitably reflects. It carries the traces of being watched, the burden of expectation, the pressure of recognition. When attention drifts away, does the face remain still, or does it slip into another truth unseen?
18.09 – 5.10
Insomnia group exhibition
The Blue Verve joins a beloved Helsinki tradition, the Night of the Arts @taiteidenyo, by presenting Insomnia, a curated group exhibition opening on 14th August.
Join us at Neitsytpolku 8 from 17 to 22 o'clock to discover what waits in the dark while the city sleeps.
The exhibition explores a state of drifting consciousness during insomnia periods. Visitors are invited into the strangeness of sleepless nights: wandering thoughts, dream-like places, odd sensations, flickering images, and the unraveling of time. Dreams, daydreams, fantasies, and moments of disconnection - these are the threads the exhibition gathers.
14.08 – 31.08
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Lucid group exhibition
We are delighted to invite you to the Lucid group exhibition at The Blue Verve on Thursday, 17 July. Join us at Neitsytpolku 8 for an evening of enigmatic art!
Inspired by the dusk and still of July nights, Lucid is an exhibition about perception in transition - the way light, memory, and inner vision sharpen in these gentle hours between sunset and dark. The title refers not only to the clarity of vision but also to lucid dreaming, a state where the border between conscious control and subconscious drift is momentarily blurred.
This group show gathers artists whose work captures this twilight state of mind: where the visible becomes suggestive, and the internal world becomes luminous. The works in Lucid invite a deeper attentiveness, one tuned to the slowness and stillness of July nights.
17.07 – 03.08
Softshell by Eeva Paavela
We are proud to present Softshell - a Solo Exhibition by Eeva Paavela, a graduate of the Academy of Fine Arts of Helsinki. The title Softshell can refer to a material that offers its wearer warmth and comfort in addition to protection from harsh elements, or to a creature having a fragile shell, sometimes due to recent shedding.
In Softshell, Paavela explores the tension between vulnerability and protection through naturalistic, figurative oil paintings on linen. Shells evoke dreams of protected space. “The shell is a refuge for the ugliest and most unlovable form of oneself. But I am not only advocating for shell life here. The shell is not merely a tomb; its inhabitant must emerge sooner or later,” Paavela writes.
Paavela’s artworks question what we reveal, what we conceal, and whether gentleness might make emergence possible. Or must every shell open?