L’Esprit de l’Escalier, Henrietta Lehtonen, Hedy Leung, Eglė Ridikaitė: The art of
This group exhibition seeks to bring together visual art, architecture and design as an extended field. The art of blends distinct practices such as painting, installation, graphic design, exhibition design or flower arrangement into a meditation on ancient cultural tropes that are still relevant and relatable: natural and enhanced memory, tradition and innovation, authorship and anonymity.
L’Esprit de L’Escalier is an international project set up in Helsinki’s Kulttuurisauna in 2012 to further the idea of publishing as a creative practice. When working under this label, translatable as ‘staircase wit’, its authors remain anonymous. Their contribution to The art of hinges on a new version of a display from the exhibition Unbuilt Helsinki at the Finnish Museum of Architecture in 2012. There is also a ceramic wall piece based on Le Corbusier’s unauthorised murals – now vandalised with graffiti – at E 1027, Irish architect Eileen Gray’s modernist villa on the French Riviera.
Henrietta Lehtonen (Finland, 1965, lives in Tampere) trained as an architect and emerged on the international art scene with the ‘relational aesthetics’ wave of the mid-1990s. She revisits her hybrid installations from that period in Nest (reconstruction of a nest I wanted to build 6 years old) (2026), which may be characterised as a personal ’memory palace’. To realise it she has used fragile objects that were off limits in her childhood, as well as books from her late mother’s bookshop in Tampere.
Hedy Leung (Hong Kong, 1975, lives in London) has come to visual art through the practice of contemporary experimental ikebana. Her materials tend to be sourced around the venues where she realises her installations, which are constructed around an inaugural performance moment. The Helsinki Wholesale Market is her point of departure for What Hands Give, What Ground Keeps (2026), made with what she could scavenge in the area or obtain through interaction with its shops, restaurants and bars.
Eglė Ridikaitė (Lithuania, 1966, lives in Vilnius) uses a self-invented technique of spray painting through stencils. In recent years she has been making 1:1 representations of patterned tile floors from 19th and 20th-century buildings in Vilnius. Floor of the Great Synagogue of Vilna (2024–26) is a triptych of large unstretched canvases documenting the terrazzo floors of the famed synagogue, demolished after the Second World War. Another triptych, Self-Portraits (Among Pictures) (2024–24), portrays her former studio walls in another demolished building on the same site.
Curators: Anders Kreuger, Markus Lähteenmäki, Mika Savela.
Free entrance