Hello, I'm Tarvo Merkällinen.

Born in 1988, Tarvo Merkällinen looks back on an unconventional career, shaped by his origins as a working-class child and his time as a competitive athlete in ski jumping and motorsport, he found his way to art without academic training via the autodidactical path. He began drawing on canvas in 2014. Initially, his works were more naive and expressionistic, but since 2025 he has developed a distinctive visual language, which he describes as "post-geometric Op Art with expressionistic and surrealist components." His motifs arise from spontaneous ideas, experiments, and chance observations, which he combines into digital collages and then transfers to the canvas. In addition to painting, his creative spectrum also includes sculpting, music and video production, design, photography and writing, thus forming an interdisciplinary field of artistic practice.