EXUBERANCE Estonian Female Artist and Nature

Exuberance - a collection of exhilaratingly abundant and energetic feelings. This is how the word could be explained and how the exhibition in the Haus Gallery could be characterized, featuring 9 well-known Estonian female artists who, by painting nature, have intertwined today's experience with the primordial. Nature is the main theme of the exhibition works, but here it is more of a metaphor that marks the feminine side of the world more broadly - the quiet, glowing tones of warmth and protection, but also the elemental and indeterminacy flowing in a powerfully overflowing emotional color.

Twenty traditional oil and acrylic paintings are presented at the exhibition. The works made in this classic technique point to a longing for real art, at a time when, in the abundance of the Internet, we want to feel the touch of real things - nature. The integrations and oppositions of the two, the real and the technical, are humanity's broader issues to pay attention to through art - an informative image in a time-abstract virtual space versus an oil painting to be seen with your own eyes in one real and ever-passing moment.

Which experience is truer? Either what we perceive ourselves in direct contact with nature, or what we experience by looking at visual interpretations of nature, be they real or virtual. Arguably, our meditative imagination can induce feeling states comparable to reality, but only if we have experienced that reality beforehand. We only feel the wind in the painting, in the colors of which we have walked.

What kind of recognition does the exhibition bring? What is our experience of reality today? To what extent do we create touches of reality in our lives, to be felt again later in some fleeting moments; even in the exhibition hall, forgetting to perceive, without any logical explanation, the flicker of air in the nostril or the raindrop on the cheek, provoked by the delicate yellow and blue color play in the painting. There is nothing logical in art. Art is an urgent need to record and convey experienced sensations in some other, but clearly recognizable form - to paint memories of one's own "Amazonas", which is the same, but not. Art creates completely new self-values. Art is an all-encompassing process, deeply personal and universal, just like the passionate paintings of the female artists in this exhibition.

Without wanting to draw radical boundaries between the sexes or emphasize differences in experience, the difference in the mutually enriching and complementary worldviews of women and men is nevertheless evident. It is female artists who have focused on the nature of emotion and its further development more convincingly than men, creating perceptual spaces from real spaces and moments of life and their sometimes surreal further developments.

 
I remember the artist Georgia O`Keeffe, who was born in 1887 in America and is considered one of the most significant authors of 20th century modernism. A woman who, through her work, painted nature, flowers radiating colorfully from the interior of the painting space, until their abstract transformation, conveyed overflowing emotional sensations that can only be perceived physically. "I had to create an equivalent for what I felt about what I was looking at – not copy it" - she formulated, wanting to create an equivalent to what she felt when she saw her surroundings, without copying it.

 This is the starting point for the exhibitions, which, unfortunately, have a one-word untranslatable title in Estonian - Exuberance, yet being the most accurate verbal equivalent of what our female artists express with their paintings, passing on emotional experiences inspired by nature without copying it, creating completely new spaces of value, personal and at the same time touching everything and real.

The exhibition in Haus Gallery will be open from February 9 to March 9, but this collection, which is inspiring in many ways, touching and illustrative of the moment in time, will certainly find further development on our part.

 
Curator Piia Ausman