Collection

Nordea Art Foundation Finland’s collection includes many nationally renowned works and historical rarities. The collection comprises over 1,000 works by more than 250 Finnish artists.

Nearly all of these works were selected from the collection of Nordea Bank’s Finnish predecessors. It's roots lay in collections gathered over more than a century by 25 Finnish commercial banks, particularly Kansallis-Osake-Pankki (KOP) and Union Bank of Finland (UBF). At times, these collections included more than 10,000 works.

The foundation’s collection covers two centuries of Finnish art. Its best-known works are Robert Wilhelm Ekman’s Sunday Morning in a Farmhouse (1857), Helene Schjerfbeck’s At the Door of Linköping Jail in 1600 (1882) and Silence (1907), Akseli Gallen-Kallela’s The Lament of the Boat (1907) and Portrait of C.G. Mannerheim (1929), Ellen Thesleff’s Human Figures in Nature (1911) and Pekka Halonen’s March (1911).

The foundation’s collection also features many renowned modern works, such as Tove Jansson’s Fantasy (1954), Juhana Blomstedt’s Dialogue (1967), Ernst Mether-Borgström’s The Ladder of Heaven (1968), Sam Vanni’s Expansion (1980), Leena Luostarinen’s Snake Flower (1986) as well as many works by Anitra Lucander, Ahti Lavonen and Reidar Särestöniemi. Besides oil paintings, the collection includes watercolours and graphics as well as nearly 100 sculptures and textile works. Alongside its own collection, the foundation also manages Nordea’s Finnish portrait collection, which comprises 69 works.