Espoo Museum of Modern Art
WeeGee Sculpture Park
Welcome to WeeGee Sculpture Park! In this guide, you will find information about the five sculptures in the park. They are from EMMA’s collections, and they complement the concrete architecture of the WeeGee building, designed by Aarno Ruusuvuori. As you enter the park, you are welcomed by Pekka Jylhä’s The Rope Dancer, located next to the building with Leikki – the Museum of Play and Kruunu − The Finnish Museum of Horology and Jewellery. Matti Peltokangas’s cube-shaped spectrolite sculpture Passage stands at the corner of the park, while Pertti Kukkonen’s concrete wall-like piece A Winding Path is on the park’s opposite edge. Closest to the Weegee building is Eero Hiironen’s Pro Aqua, which celebrates the importance of water, and next to it is Raimo Utriainen’s aluminium sculpture Stream I.
On your way to EMMA from Tapiola’s centre, there is also Kim Simonsson’s Emma Leaves a Trace at Tapiola metro station and Pekka Kauhanen’s Art Police in the roundabout on Pohjantie. You can find all of EMMA’s public artworks in Espoo’s map service.
Hiironen, Eero
Pro Aqua
Eero Hiironen deals with the subject of water in his work, a subject that fascinated him for decades. “Without water, there would be no life,” Hiironen said at the installation of the sculpture. The sculpture is made of shiny stainless steel, the artist’s favourite material, which is very challenging to work with. Weighing some 1,500 kg and measuring almost six and a half metres in length, it is one of Hiironen’s largest steel sculptures.
Jylhä, Pekka
The Rope Dancer
A figure, modelled on Jylhä’s own daughter, balances on a planet-shaped sphere. The sculpture illustrates the courage we need when the world around us is in turmoil. The artist says of his work: “We live in uncertain times. The future of our fragile planet seems to hang in the balance. Amid the turmoil, I searched for a form and a story that would speak to this moment. The Rope Dancer is an image of this precarious time – and of a person who endures to the very end.”
The Rope Dancer includes a poem by the author and dramaturge Maria Peura, which is presented alongside the work
I made it all the way,
I carried my own path
Now I am rewarded,
within me winds arise,
the world is torn in two
I stand firm
Maria Peura
Translated from the Finnish by Christina Saarinen.
The work has been created in collaboration with EMMA, the City of Espoo, and the Saastamoinen Foundation.
Kukkonen, Pertti
A Windin Path
Pertti Kukkonen’s wall-like A Winding Path is a great match to architect Aarno Ruusuvuori’s WeeGee building because they are both made of concrete. Both Kukkonen and Ruusuvuori have explored concrete and its potential in their work. The sculpture is a through-coloured wall, cast in three parts on site, with a polished upper surface that emphasises the undulating form of the work.
Peltokangas, Matti
Passage
The stone used in Matti Peltokangas’s Passage is spectrolite, which is found in Ylämaa in South Karelia. The surface of the cubical sculpture features slanted, slightly rough grooves, a characteristic detail of the artist’s stone works. There are similar grooves also in the four red granite cubes of Peltokangas’s memorial monument to President Relander (1996) in Helsinki.
Utriainen, Raimo
Stream I
A stream is constant movement, made visible in the aluminium slats of Stream I. The slats are typical of the late-period works of sculptor Raimo Utriainen. Utriainen began his career in the 1950s, working with traditional sculptural techniques but in the 1970s, he switched from bronze to steel and abandoned figurative subjects. Alongside his fine arts studies, Utriainen studied mathematics and architecture. The sculpture is based on Utriainen’s Stream series sculpture Stream I, of which the Raimo Utriainen Art Foundation commissioned a new, larger version.