Exhibition > Present > Haus Gallery

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Haus Gallery 19.11.2022

NUMBERED LANDSCAPES

Urmas Pedanik belongs to the group of like-minded designers, architects and artists who appeared on the art scene in the 1960s and 70s, who stubbornly and intelligently opposed the then prevailing social realist requirements. Hyperrealism/photorealism, with which reality was subtly exaggerated, was one of those artistic expressions that created its own realities by opposing the governmentaly side of Soviet art. In addition, the minds and works of young artists were dominated by modern technologies and figurative thinking.

Urmas Pedanik's photorealistic creations are captivating from their first moment to today's transformations, which are always accompanied by a deeply philosophical line of cognition. A juxtaposing analysis of the machine universe with real life, until it transforms into the closed horizon of nature...

After a longer creative break, Pedanik stepped out as a painter again in 2010, focusing his attention more and more deeply on the technological world that interests him, entering the image-rhythmic space of radios, televisions and computers and amplifying miniature technical schemes into undersized generalizations under the artist's magnifying glass. In 2019, Pedanik was recognized with the Konrad Mägi prize for his electronic paintings. Later, the artist became interested in the power relations between technology and nature, where one derives from the other, mixes with the other or creates strange interruptions up to the pure fields of nature, which is the subject of this exhibition.

17 numbered landscapes, exhibited in Haus Gallery, cause some astonishment with their extreme realism, where the real moment captured by the artist's camera has been given new layers; where the world that we actually see and store in our memory becomes either more brightly colored or more nostalgic in our eyes according to our emotions. Pedanik talks about self-creation, self-painting of all realities. About how reality is questionable and its beauty or restraint challenges the interpreter.

In the exhibition we see rows of sea beaches and forest lines photographed by Urmas Pedanik himself, covered with paint, from its invisible fusions to energetic, spontaneous brushstrokes, raising the question of where the photo begins and the painting starts. Often it is almost impossible to delineate the real and the imaginary in the painting, questioning which could be more taken as a fact. The works created in the authorial technique of Urmas Pedanik, which mix photography and painting, make the factual nature of both fascinatingly questionable and intriguingly confusing, involving the viewer in the independent game of art.

Curator - Piia Ausman 

 

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