Dark Ateneum coloring book

Dark is the new black!

JP Ahonen’s Dark Ateneum is a joyfully boundary-breaking pastiche coloring book in which the classics of Finnish art are given a dark, humorous, and slightly hellish new lease on life.

The canon of art history is expanded with tour buses, black metal poses, occult family moments, and plague-ridden rockers coated in festival mud. This is a book for those who have always wanted to see Lemminkäinen in corpse paint or to color Schjerfbeck’s self-portraits in shades even darker than the originals.

The book features pastiches inspired by well-known works by artists such as Edelfelt, Gallen-Kallela, Järnefelt, Schjerfbeck, and Simberg — but never as straightforward reproductions. The artworks are twisted and reimagined in a way that combines Ahonen’s distinctive comic style (familiar from works such as Villimpi Pohjola and Belzebubs), cultural self-irony, and dark laughter.

Dark Ateneum is aimed at young people and adults who love art, gothic vibes, and black humor — or who simply want to color a truly grim gig weekend. The coloring book continues the collaboration between Tammi and the Finnish National Gallery, whose goal is to attract new generations and audiences to Finnish visual art. Art belongs to everyone — even to those whose colored pencils come only in different shades of black.

• Publisher: Tammi, 2026.
• Texts, illustrations, graphic design: JP Ahonen.
•  ISBN 9789520479701
• Size 19 x 25 cm. 
• Softcover.
• Language Finnish and English.