Erich Pehap

The artist, who emigrated to Canada, has created a still-life of unexpected colour compositions and patterns, incorporating an exuberant view – nude motifs, flowers, fruit, textiles, wallpaper, ceramics, wood, and more. A particularly strong community of Estonian artists developed in Canada, where people emigrated to escape the war and political upheavals, for the reason that Canada’s climate and the longitude of the globe most resembled that of Estonia. Erich Pehap was one of the artists educated in Tartu in the 1930s, at the Pallas School of Art, on the more practical side. The linocut is a readily available graphic technique that has been considered too simplistic by graphic traditionalists, but which rose to greater prominence with the pop art of the 1960s, where the aesthetic categories of ‘high and low’ shifted places.