The Sculpture Park of Matti Lepistö offers a startling, surrealistic view that spreads across the home yard of the late ITE artist in Pattijoki, Raahe. The Sculpture Park consists of short 300 concrete sculptures depicting people and animals, rural characters, and mythology from the Finnish national epic Kalevala and this magical thing called human life.
The desire to create and express burns in the artist’s heart. An artist’s career can start, for example, by making a snowman, as happened to Matti Lepistö. After seeing a picture of a wonderful snowman in a magazine as a child, Matti was inspired to create a snow sculpture of his own. It was the man’s life-long destiny and vocation, and a way of life. Becoming an artist was inevitable, and after ending his working career as a machinist in 1990, Matti devoted himself entirely to art.
Concrete sculpting was Matti Lepistö’s main technique, which he got excited about during a sculpture course at the adult education center in 1980. After that, he started making concrete sculptures for customers as orders and for sale, and soon they filled his own yard entirely.
According to Matti, different techniques in making art meet different needs, even though the underlying desire to create is the same. Disciplined and well-planned concrete sculpture transforms the artist’s mental images into a visible form that viewers can understand. Matti also liked to paint pictures, which were a surprising discovery trip into the world of colors and shapes. The process of free self-expression could surprise even the artist himself. The versatile artist’s repertoire also included photography, stained glass works and writing.
Matti Lepistö could not fight against becoming an artist. It was an inevitable fate.
There are various subjects in the art the prolific ITE artist. Some of the works in the sculpture park are performing sculptures with human and animal figures based on a pictorial idea. There are also surrealist sculptures and themes drawn from mythology. Series of works based on narrative themes include, for example, a series criticizing religions, eagle-headed figures, egg motifs depicting the birth of life, and rural depictions.
Matti developed his own concrete sculpting technique, which is suitable for both small and large works and is thus particularly suitable for playing with differences in size. The meticulous artist always copied the dimensions and shapes of the subjects with discipline, striving for a finished result. Matti himself called his sculpture style contemporary realism because his sculptures always had a subject. A good subject in itself inspires to realize the work and cast the artist’s mental image into the form of a sculpture.
A good subject arouses the artist's curiosity and the desire to see how the picture painted by imagination looks like as a sculpture.
Please check the current opening hours of the Sculpture Park of Matti Lepistö and find tips about events at the sculpture park on Facebook. The entrance fee can be paid in cash in the locker on the table or with MobilePay.
