Marika Mäkelä was born in Oulu, in 1947. She graduated from the Finnish Academy of Fine Arts in 1973, having enrolled in 1969. Emerging during the neo-expressionistic wave in the 1980s, she immediately positioned herself as one of the central voices of renewal in the Finnish contemporary art scene alongside other influential female artists such Marjatta Tapiola and Leena Luostarinen. She maintained her influence on the Finnish art scene through her teaching positions as the head teacher at the School of the Finnish Academy of Arts from 1983 to 1985 and at the School of Art and Design.

Mäkelä’s work is characterised by a confident and generous use of colour, often thickly layered and used in a highly graphic manner. This latter aspect is completed by the inclusion of black or dark-coloured eastern (near and far) symbols applied in a gestural fashion. At the end of the 1990s she experimented with naïve art style printmaking techniques, a method the artist was keen to use but had not studied, trusting her assistants and the happy accidents that can occur. Between more extensive use of relief, even sculptural phases and flattened printed mediums, a thematic through-line has remained in her work: the motif of mother and child.

A first solo exhibition in Helsinki in 1974 kick-started a prolific international career, during which she participated in the Paris Biennial in 1983, the New Scandinavian Painting Exhibition in New York in 1990 and in Barbican Centre in London in 1992. Retrospective exhibitions in her honour have been held in Gothenburg Kunsthalle and in the Aboa Vetus & Ars Nova Museum in Turku.

Her public commissions include Tuusula County Hall (1980), Kivenlahti swimming hall in Espoo (1984), the Art, Time, Thought triptych in Gävle Concert Hall (1997) and Kauniainen Church (2001). She was awarded the State Art Committee Prize in 1974 and the Finnish Cultural Fund’s Prize in 1994.

Mäkelä lives and works in Helsinki.