Mari Rantanen is one of Finland's foremost and most prominent contemporary artists who in recent years has had a very large number of solo exhibitions at museums and art galleries around the world, not least in Sweden, Finland and the USA. One of the most recent major exhibitions was at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Stockholm in 2026.

Rantanen began her artistic education at the Helsinki Academy of Fine Arts, 1975-1979. She then studied in New York at the Pratt Institute, 1982-1983. She lived and worked in New York from 1985–1996, after which she moved to Stockholm, where she was a professor at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts from 1996–2005. She received the Young Artist of the Year award in 1989.

In early wor...