Exhibition

Roots and Currents: The Favén Artist Family

Dates

10 April 2026 – 30 May 2026

Location

Gallery GAo ShAn

Snellmaninkatu 15
00170 Helsinki
Finland

What does a creative life look like across three generations?

Roots and Currents: The Favén Artist Family explores the continuity of artistic practice within the Favén family, moving beyond a traditional chronological narrative.

The exhibition brings together Antti Favén’s personal and artistic legacy, Mauri Favén’s abstract works, and the mobiles and jewellery of the still-active artist Aino Favén.

Oil paintings, drawings, and moving forms are presented within a shared space, where tools, sketches, and photographs offer glimpses into the stories behind the works and persons.

Antti, Mauri, and Aino Favén represent three generations of an artist family in which artistic inheritance has not unfolded through direct lines of influence. Each has developed their practice within the context of their own time.

Antti Favén (1882–1948) is known for his portraits, distinguished by a refined formal language and a cultivated European sensibility. His works are closely connected to the notable figures of his time, while retaining a lyrical sensitivity and luminosity.

Mauri Favén (1920–2006) moved with determination toward modernism and abstraction, approaching the world through colour, rhythm, and lived experience. His recollections of the summer of the 1952 Helsinki Olympics at the bar of Hotel Kämp evoke an artist who observed people at close range with an almost entomologist-like curiosity. In his work, this manifests as a continuous movement between tradition and experimentation: a strong grounding in classical principles, paired with a persistent drive to push expression to its limits.

In Aino Favén’s (b. 1957) practice, the family does not appear as a direct influence, but rather as a space that enabled her development as an artist. Her career has evolved from textile and jewellery art to installations and the use of recycled materials. Materiality, craftsmanship, and movement are central—her mobiles and light structures emphasise motion, balance, and a sense of freedom in relation to tradition.

The exhibition creates a space in which three independent artistic trajectories meet.

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