LOOKING BACK / ANNIVERSARY EXHIBITION

On 22 August, artist Uno Roosvalt celebrates his 85th birthday – a monumental milestone, which Haus Galerii marks with an equally monumental exhibition, consisting mainly of paintings from different periods of the artist’s career. The exhibition features powerful and large-format works inspired by the artist’s lifelong source of inspiration – nature and the northern coastline.

Uno Roosvalt is the most devoted interpreter of nature motifs on the Estonian art scene, having developed his own unmistakably recognisable artistic style. Realistic elements in his works intertwine with abstract stylisation, while powerful emotional tones are at once expressive and considered. Nature is intensified by emphasising its forms through contours and contrasting colour rhythms, with a palette that heightens reality – stones, cliffs, convergences and receding expanses of landscapes and coastlines. In his paintings, Roosvalt highlights and vividly characterises both the vast dimensions of landscapes and their individual moments – panoramas and their accents. The artist emphasises the character of his “landscape figures”, seeking through the stroke of his brush to reveal their true nature and individuality.

Uno Roosvalt speaks of nature as man’s existential companion, of its primordial power and quiet whisper at once. Thus, the ideas and emotional combinations in the artist’s paintings sometimes become elegiacally lyrical and hymn-like in their praise, orchestrating colour and compositional interplay into a powerful harmony of different instruments. Referring to the Norwegian musician, Roosvalt’s work resonates “Grieg-like”. It is precisely these kinds of landscapes that form the main focus of the anniversary exhibition.

As a crowning element, the exhibition also features the artist’s self-portrait, in which he places himself at the centre and in the background of his stylised landscape, looking at the viewer from there as if through the eyes of his own landscapes. The self-portrait forms a beautiful pair with the portrait of the artist’s wife, Mari Roosvalt, whom Uno has depicted at different times in various ways, yet always with recognisable deep and warm admiration. The exhibition also includes several of the artist’s drawings, as drawing forms a distinctive and outstanding part of Uno Roosvalt’s oeuvre alongside his painting, in which the artist continues his characteristic approach to the world, doing so with extraordinary virtuosity and sensitivity in a dark palette, interwoven with notes of reddish sanguine.

Uno Roosvalt is an artist whose long, long creative journey one could wander along endlessly, noticing and sensing what he has noticed – seeing through the artist’s eyes the endless manifestations of the essence of nature’s spiritual world and admiring his artistic skill in conveying it all.

We congratulate Uno Roosvalt on his anniversary, celebrating and applauding at once both the deeply warm-hearted person and the deeply perceived nature in his paintings, with which Uno Roosvalt is so inseparably connected!

Uno Roosvalt received his education as a painter at Tartu Art School and the Estonian State Art Institute (Estonian Academy of Arts), where he later worked as a lecturer from 1969 to 2012. Roosvalt has participated in exhibitions since 1968. The artist has received numerous awards and prizes (including the Konrad Mägi Medal), and his works are held in the collections of the Art Museum of Estonia, the Tartu Art Museum and the Tallinn Art Hall. He is the author of numerous book illustrations and has created landscape views, graphic works depicting coastal life and the sea, monumental oil paintings and distinctive drawings, captivating with their black-and-white colour schemes interwoven with individual hues. Roosvalt’s work has drawn its primary inspiration from nature and the coastlines, which he presents by balancing on the boundary between realism and abstraction.

Text: Piia Ausman