WOMEN AS ARTISTS IN ART

A collection that intriguingly brings together a selection of works by Estonian women artists from different generations.

Without intending to draw radical boundaries between the sexes or emphasize differences in experience, the difference in worldview between women and men – one that enriches and complements each other – is nevertheless evident. It is women artists in particular who, throughout history, have focused more convincingly than men on the essence of emotion and its development, creating perception spaces and at times surreal extensions of real spaces and life moments, whether in a more realistic or abstract style.

One is reminded of the artist Georgia O’Keeffe, born in 1887 in America and regarded as one of the most remarkable artists of 20th-century modernism. A woman who, through her art, painted nature – flowers radiating with vibrant color from within the pictorial space – until they transformed into abstraction, conveying almost physically perceptible, overflowing emotional sensations. "I had to create an equivalent for what I felt about what I was looking at – not copy it," she stated, aiming to create an equivalent of what she felt when observing the world around her, without copying it.

One of the defining characteristics of this collection is unfortunately encapsulated in a word that cannot be translated into Estonian with a single equivalent – exuberance. And yet, it is the most accurate verbal equivalent for what our women artists express in their paintings: emotionally charged experiences inspired by life, nature, and existentialism, creating entirely new visual realms of value – personal and abstract, yet at the same time deeply universal and real.