Vilen Künnapu
(1948)
St Nicholas. 2016
Acrylic, canvas. 70 x 50 cm (not framed)
price 4 800
Vilen Künnapu, an icon of Estonian avant-garde architecture and art, has painted series of paintings of Tallinn’s Old Town, in which medieval architecture acquires an edgy image that could be described as its spiritual, rather than physical, manifestation to the architect-artist. In this painting, too, the church of St Nicholas, familiar to us all, with its Gothic frame and Baroque tower, has acquired an extraordinary colouring. This year, in 2023, the owner of the church of St Nicholas, the Art Museum of Estonia, completed an innovative ‘sky-lift’, which allows you to view the panorama of the Old Town quickly, without having to climb endless flights of stairs. Among the buildings designed by Vilen Künnapu himself, there is the flower shop on Väike-Karja street in the Old Town (1983), but he has also designed the Palm House of the Tallinn Botanical Gardens (1999), the Tallinn Viru Centre together with architect Ain Padrik (2004), the Tartu Snail Tower (2008), Kadriorg Plaza (2020) and other landmark buildings that belong to architectural history.