Julia Valtanen (b. 1988) is a Tallinn-based artist working across painting and collage, with her recent practice centred on painting. Her work explores the porous relationship between human, botanical and other organic forms, creating compositions in which bodies and environments appear to emerge, dissolve and reform within one another.

Rather than depicting fixed subjects, Valtanen is interested in states of becoming: the subtle movement of matter and the ways different forms of life coexist and influence one another. Her recent paintings move between abstraction and recognisable fragments, using fluid layers of oil, saturated colour and recurring biomorphic forms to create images that feel simultaneously bodily, botanical and imagined.

Valtanen holds a Master’s degree in graphic design and later studied painting at the Estonian Academy of Arts. She lives and works in Tallinn, where her studio is based at ARS Art Factory.