Patric Old has powerfully entered international art arena with innovative and interdisciplinary MA in Royal Collage of Arts. Old went on establishing his career cooperating with MATTEL, COSMOPOLITAN and Oxford University, adding fashion and science spice into applied arts and the other way around.

It is not very often, when we meet foreign artists, who are known on a world art arena and who would find their way to Estonia, keep here a studio, create here actively and finally organize here exhibitions. Patric Old, being an artist of English origin and attending at the moment University of Oxford reading a practice led Doctorate in Fine Art, has been for four years as an artist a studio in Kadriorg drawing, painting and executing smaller projects and workshops.

If until now Patric Old is known to the Estonian art lovers for his large-format charcoal drawings that were exposed two years ago in the Draakoni gallery, then at “Doll Works” Old presents to the Estonians for the first time his acrylic paintings, which were accomplished both in the artist´s homeland England and also abroad, here in Estonia. The core of the exposition is being made up by works, with which Patric Old participated in 2005 in the Brighton Museum, at the exhibition supervised by Suzie Plumb, “Guys'n'Dolls: Art, Science, Fashion & Relationship”. This spectacular exposition concentrated on the vast sphere of the meanings of a doll as an ambiguous symbol and on different roles that are being attached to it in the modern society. In the works by Patric Old, Hans Bellmer, Man Ray, Oskar Kokoschka and other exhibitors human-like mannequins are playing the leading roles, on the example of which can be followed in a figurative manner the alteration of the position of a man and woman in the society.

The inducement to show the vast handling possibilities of a doll reaches in the case of Patric Old already back to the 1970's, while at his studies at Middlesex Polytechnic he was introduced to German surrealist's Hans Bellmer doll sculptures by his biographer. The theme of a doll has been explored by Patric, possessing a multi-coloured and vast career, both in a anthropological manner and in practice. Together with Anne Zielinski-Old he has participated in the process of creating parts of the Barbie doll, he has also animated for the interactive software Barbie´s 3D digital head. At the moment the artist is completing his doctoral studies at the University of Oxford and working on his thesis “Bioaesthetecs: Visualization of the New Meaning of Being Human”.

Portraits and nudes that were exposed in the Draakoni gallery were preliminary works and a certain kind of introduction for the present paintings. In his paintings Patric has breathed life into lifeless and soulless doll with a plastic body. They have almost become post-human. Patric's paintings are of extreme virtuosity and lightness, showing highly developed figurative drawing skills. Still, differently from the natural postures of the models, the artist has manipulated with the mannequins, he has freely played with their body angles and this way has made them defenseless and vulnerable. The depicted bodies have been arranged into unnatural positions and twists as if demonstrating, how dolls are used for playing and in such a manner also emphasizing their helplessness. At the same time Patric has lifted them from the status of being just objects of passion or consumption into the role of mediators of a social dialogue. The doll with its all-embracing, plain and provocative power that has nowadays been attributed to it, symbolizes for the artist the fragility and dubiousness of human existence. Patric Old presents the doll in a new form as an 'actor' with her passing cultural 'all-American' baggage into the New American Century of Post-911.

Little photoreport of J.Klõšeiko from the exhibition opening: