Exhibition > Past > Haus Gallery

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Haus Gallery 08.03.2022-06.04.2022

Toomas Vint With Maarit Murka

Toomas Vint With Maarit Murka - a collaborative exhibition, representing two artists from two different generations, is open until April 6, 2022.
Together the authors’ works alternate with each other, creating a dynamic rhythm and a natural match.

This exhibition consists of works from Maarit Murka's series Animal Instinct, and Toomas Vint's works from the late 1990s, where the world is buried differently in green than his later works – cities like forests, nostalgic twin towers like from New York, timeless pyramids, and Toompea with a certain power of darkness with the essence of gravity and mystique. Besides Vint's greenery, Maarit Murka's dogs run towards the viewer through flowers painted on glass, but her rabbit, fox, tiger and wolf have stayed back in the artist's world of thought.

Maarit Murka's multi-layered paintings intrigue the search for hidden animals and stunning landscapes. The series of works with animals exhibited by Murka have been inspired by the restricted times that have hit us all. The corona pandemic rallied outside while beds were made and families were moving from room to room inside their homes. The moods of certain harassment and fears, which Maarit Murka has embodied in her art, have created multi-dimensional works that emit a powerful but mutilating and pleasant effect, losing all perception of heaviness. Murka has painted white beds at the bottom of her works, and in front of them in a layer of plexiglass, animals that look directly at the audience through details of circles, hearts and dots. Animals are protectors between our fears and the world.

The exhibition bears the title "Toomas Vint With Maarit Murka" in a somewhat captivating manner, where both artists turn their understanding of traditional painting and traditional reality somewhat upside down. A reasonable inspiration for this title was Maarit Murka's and Toomas Vint’s surnames. Murka’s and Vint's joint performances are both personal and general, both intimate and global, equally linked by the artists’ ability to generalize their messages and play them intellectually.

Maarit Murka is a lead figure in the hyper-realistic style of Estonian contemporary art. With an active interest in socio-historical circumstances, she depicts ordinary people and everyday situations, adding social sharpness to them, emphasizing it in her paintings - combining various modern materials in the works and finding attractive forms for them. Maarit Murka graduated from the Estonian Academy of Arts in 2004 with a degree in painting, she obtained a master's degree from the Helsinki Academy of Fine Arts and has also studied for a master's degree at the Baltic Film and Media School. Murka is a member of the Estonian Artists' Union and the Painters' Union and has been active in exhibitions both in Estonia and abroad since 2001.

Toomas Vint started as an artist following the example of his brother Tõnis Vint, being a self-taught painter. The paintings buried in green, recognizable as his handwriting, move from surrealism to a sense of absurdity and realism. The lighting solutions of seemingly static scenes are unsurpassed, the details are composed. The result of Toomas Vint's analytical mind is often a metaphysical painting, an experience of an ideal landscape, where everything seems clean and eternally unspoiled. Toomas Vint's landscapes have formed an important place in Estonian art history. Vint, who has appeared in exhibitions countless times and won prizes, is today regarded as a classic of Estonian modern art and as a separate phenomenon. He is a member of both the Estonian Artists’ Union and the Writers' Union, whose creative career began vigorously in the 1960s.

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