Aleksanteri Ahola-Valo

Aleksanteri Ahola-Valo (27 January 1900, in Impilahti, Karelia – 15 September 1997, Simrishamn, Sweden) was a Finnish artist, architect and thinker.

"Ahola-Valo has lived through many of the dreams and tragedies of our century: Bloody Sunday in St Petersburg in 1905, the collapse of Czarist Russia and the birth of the Soviet Union, the artistic utopias and avantgardism of the early 20th century, Stalinism, flight from the country,...the dissolution and abolition of the Soviet Union along with the rest of us.

Marc Chagall, Sergei Eisenstein, Nadezhda Konstaninovna Krupskaya, Anatoly Lunacharsky, Maxim Gorky and Vladimir Tatlin: all are episodes and encounters in his life story."

At the age of 14 he wrote a play, Aikuiset ja lapset kasvatuksen pyörteissä (Adults and children in the whirls of education).

"Aleksanteri Ahola and his friends had a theatre of their own in early 1910's in the villa community of Vyritsa in Ingermanland, 60 kilometers to the south of St. Petersburg.

Ali Ahola painted them himself and they showed local buildings, forest, clouds, whatever needed."

Kimmo Sarje: "He left the Soviet Union for Finland in 1933, but his work was hindered by damaging political prejudice.

Nevertheless, while in Finland he took part in many exhibitions, and even started his own business, Ahola-Valon taidetuotanto (Ahola-Valo art production)."

In: Aleksanteri Ahola-Valo: Aikuiset ja lapset kasvatuksen pyörteissä (Adults and children in the whirls of education).