Silvia Jõgever
(1924–2005)
Abstraktne kompositisioon. 1964
Water-colours, ink, collage, paper. 41.5 x 30 cm (not framed)
Starting price 1 023
Silvia Jõgever was one of these last students, who could enter to the art school, which was established in the place of “Pallas”, that in spite of its name change still carried the Pallas spirit. The school was not yet mentally ruined and kept on functioning also during the war period. Elmar Kits was the teacher and Ülo Sooster, Valdur Ohakas, Henn Roode and other were the students. “Maybe they were the last carriers of the Pallas-style art mentality and spirit,” writes the Union of Artists in Jõgever’s obituary. In these two works can be seen, which kind of powerful freedom and fantasy uses Jõgever, who worked as an art teacher in the 1960ies, in his creation. He painted, but his style was not dry depiction of the reality, instead he painted absurd situations, artistic images, offering creative solutions. Jõgever introduced on the so-called holy painting surface clippings from newspapers, showing in this manner the absurdity of the period. Directly visual issues, testing with most different forms and patterns that would not be tied to the suppressing reality, but which would fight their own battles, the battles of independent art, became of interest. And still these are not school teacher’s pranks in the afternoon, but they are the convinced works of an artist who has received classical education regarding colours and forms. Colours are never random on his works, he knows, when to add pale blue, when reddish hues. He does not scribble with a pen on the paper, but sets forms and adjusts contours exactly so that the work would become an integer. This is pure aesthetic enjoyment, in the name of which Jõgever works in the 1960ies and which he fights for. And exactly this is the art, which allows decades later the local art scientists to say: yes, we lived in a closed zone, but our artists’ thoughts were free to travel everywhere. When abstractionism existed in the West, also we had it.