Urmas Pedanik 1949 White Houses. 1976

The work of Valged majad (White Houses) is not a neutral description of some arbitrary house. ‘White house’ is a term. Leaving aside the politically important specific building in Washington, D.C., the white houses have another connotation. The term denotes a modernist functionalist type of building with certain aesthetic features (strict geometry, flat roof, vertical or horizontal tape windows, walls of white colour). This last is known to all artists who have received a modernist art education, including Urmas Pedanik. However, the moody streetscape here, painted perfectly, is influenced by the fact that houses of white colour have been painted, which, however, do not belong to the canon of modernist architecture. A peaceful small town lives its own life, and the white house wall probably has a different context. (There are more white houses in Estonian painting history: In 2011, the painter Tõnis Saadoja published the book Urmas Ploomipuu valge maja (Urmas Ploomipuu’s White House), where he analysed the painting of a fellow artist.) 
Urmas Pedanik participated in the art innovation of the 1970s, but art scholar Reet Varblane writes in Sirp on 15 November 2019 in connection with the Konrad Mägi Award: ‘Urmas Pedanik took a break from his career as an artist for almost a quarter of a century, but then came to the art public with completely new works. His cityscapes and electrical circuits of the 1970s and 1980s belong to the gold fund of Estonian painting of that time. It is more correct to call his art at that time photographic rather than hyperrealism: in organising the image space, he has used the help of photographic media and taken into account its peculiarity, but in his works the hyper-reality inherent in the glass skyscrapers of the metropolis of the last quarter of the 20th century is absent.