about
Muriel Kuoppala’s abstract, often minimalistic paintings explore the depths of human consciousness. Her work bypasses conventional meaning, using abstraction to evoke what cannot be said—reducing experience to its rawest elements: rhythm, space, form, and color. Rooted in a lineage devoted to the study of inner life, Kuoppala sees herself as part of a continuum—an inheritor of a long-standing inquiry into the unseen. As an artist, she not only navigates her own consciousness but also wades through a vast ocean of images, symbols, and generational knowledge passed down through her family.
Her practice is both personal and ancestral, navigating her own inner world while drawing from a reservoir of images, symbols, and inherited knowledge. Each painting is both artifact and enigma—an attempt to map the invisible through the visible.
bio
Muriel Kuoppala is a Swiss-born visual artist currently based in Tāmaki Makaurau, Aotearoa, New Zealand. She studied visual arts at the Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK) and at the Academy of Fine Arts in Helsinki, receiving her Master of Fine Arts (MFA) in 2010.
Muriel Kuoppala has exhibited in Switzerland, Finland, Germany, Sweden, and the USA, including at the Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art, Amos Anderson Art Museum, Malmö Konsthalle, Kunsthaus Glarus, and the Klöntal Triennale in Switzerland. Her works are in the collections of the EMMA Espoo Museum of Modern Art, the Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art, the Helsinki Academy of Fine Arts, the Finnish Art Association, and the Kunsthaus Glarus, Switzerland. She was the recipient of the Fokuspreis of Kunsthaus Glarus in 2013. In addition to her solo practice, she has worked as an artist duo together with visual artist Karri Kuoppala with the common name Kariel, and she is a co-founder of the artist-run art space SIC in Helsinki.