Minimalist landscapes with architectural elements, circular and rectangular shapes, lines that move across the surface of the paper, inviting the viewer’s eye to draw along with them – these are the visual keywords of the work of Mare Vint, who has now passed away. The exhibition at the Haus Gallery, which spans two floors, is dedicated to Mare’s memory on the month of her birthday in September. Both familiar works and those that invite us to listen to the more unique voices of Mare’s work are on display.

The artist’s unique early drawings from the late 1960s and early 1970s already show Mare as both a conceptualist and a playful stylist of subject matter.  Drawing, alongside graphic arts, runs through Mare Vint’s work. She loved to colourise her lithographs, transforming each black and white structure into an individual and unique colour space. Combining colour pencil with graphics is a speciality of Mare. She continued to draw with conviction in the final years of her oeuvre, producing experimental compositions on canvas, both in crayon and ink, subtly and vividly suggestive of the world of Vint. Canvas, the usual base material for oil paintings, became for Mare a land of new play possibilities, which she sincerely enjoyed. A series of Mare’s canvas drawings are on display at the Haus Gallery exhibition.

Sensitive, experimental, in-depth and precise, and exceptionally recognisable, Mare Vint is undeniably one of the most important graphic artists in Estonian art. She entered the local art scene with an avant-garde group of artists from the 1960s and 1970s, including Mare’s life partners Tõnis Vint and later Andres Tolts.  In their own way, Mare’s work carries the creative traits and influences of both as the result of a combined energy. The exhibition features silent dialogues between Mare and Tõnis as well as between Mare and Andres.

Tõnis Vint played an important and influential role in Mare’s life and work.  Tõnis Vint was regarded as an intellectual leader of the art scene at the time and an interpreter of the universe of signifiers of different cultures, both European and Asian. He was a cosmopolitan and a mentor to many. The shared home of Mare and Tõnis, like their work, bore the hallmarks and language of a world purged of excess and was a work of interior architecture in its own right – the young artists’ statement on life.

Mare Vint and Andres Tolts, however, were inseparable in their maturity and experience. Seen from the outside, it could be said that they shared each of the joys of their life together with an admirable love, care, and restraint, just as the juxtaposed works in their exhibition intertwine elements of each other, depicting shared freedoms and structures.

The exhibition remembering Mare Vint is far from being a glimpse into the past. The timeless nature of her work presents its own messages in the present as it once presented them or will do so in the future. Perhaps the immaculate spaces of her orderly thoughts remind us to focus, to let go of excess things, and to see the important, or the priority. Every work by Mare Vint is a collection of elements focused on a single moment. A gaze that looks closely at a tower on a landscape line or tree line on the horizon, or at the air above the sea.  The world outside the artist’s focus, on the other hand, is notionally white, as if an insignificant volume in the picture, but whose function is to compose the pleasing rhythms of the surface of the work. Mare Vint’s perspectives on the reality that surrounds her offer endless possibilities for interpreting similar and particular details, which she shares with her audience, guiding them to notice the important in often unnoticed places of meaning.

Curator Piia Ausman