Exhibition Views 2010

October 30, 2010 – January 2, 2011, Kumu Art Museum, 5th floor 
The exhibited painting dates from 2003 and is being displayed in Kumu for the first time. The art audience has had a chance to see it before in winter 2004 in the Museum of Estonian Architecture in the Rotermann Salt Storage. Viewing this painting is above all a process, a very personal meeting with the Great Love.

October 29, 2010 – January 2, 2011, Kumu Art Museum, Contemporary art gallery 
Eight video installations from seven authors will be exhibited at Everything Is Going to Be Alright, including works by international superstars and well-known local artists. The exhibition offers a selection of the best examples of classical video art from the past decade, through a loose thematic focus. The exhibition title is borrowed from the young Dutch artist Guido van der Werve's work and the common feature of all the exhibited videos is human solitude, including attempts to describe different borderline situations and to explain the most uncomfortable corners of consciousness and sub-consciousness.

Curator of the exhibition: Maria-Kristiina Soomre

October 8 – December 19, 2010, Kumu Art Museum, 4th floor, B-wing 
An exhibition entitled Photography from the Estonian Diaspora at Kumu will introduce the work produced by Estonian photographers who worked in Europe and North America after World War II, as well as material from the photo archives of the Estonian diaspora related to cultural history.

Curators of the exhibition: Eha Komissarov and Ellu Maar

September 24, 2010 – January 23, 2011, Kumu Art Museum, 3rd floor, B-wing 
The exhibition provides unique insight into the work process of England’s Romantic landscape painter John Constable (1776–1837), and charts the artist’s historical influence, which remains strong to this day.

September 3, 2010 – January 2, 2011, Kumu Art Museum, Great Hall 
By the end of World War II, approximately 70,000 people had left their homeland and Estonian cultural centres emerged all over the world. Three main centres had been established by the early 1950s: Stockholm, Toronto and New York. The Kumu display offers an extensive overview of art created in exile in the course of about 50 years, from 1944 to 1991.

Curators of the exhibition: Kersti Koll (Art Museum of Estonia), Tiiu Talvistua (Tartu Art Museum) and Reet Mark (Tartu Art Museum)

June 30 – December 12, 2010, Kumu Art Museum, Cabinet of Prints and Drawings 
The purpose of the exhibition is to emphasize metaphysical landscapes as a particular phenomenon in Estonian graphics of the 1970s. The metaphysical effect came out of an image space that was empty, cleaned up of extraneous details and actions, and which caused a particular psychological effect: odd, dreamy and almost allegorical. The photo-realistic works that dominated the period (Urmas Ploomipuu and Kaisa Puustak) are oddly joined by more symbolic, stylized creations (Illimar Paul, Tõnis Vint and Mare Vint).

June 11 – September 12, 2010, Kumu Art Museum, 3rd floor, B-wing 
One of the focal point of the exhibition is the creative contact between Konrad Mägi (1878–1925) and Alfred William Finch (1854–1930), a Belgian-Finnish artist of English origin. After an exciting summer in Åland in 1906, Mägi went to Helsinki for a year to continue his education in the Ateneum Art School, and to earn money for his trip to Paris. Willy Finch, who had come to Finland in 1897 and taught in the Ateneum Art School, had been one of the most principled followers of Georges Seurat's painting system in the 1890s. Thus, Finch might have been the first artist whose oeuvre brought Mägi in contact with the new art trend. When we compare Mägi's works completed in 1908–1915 to Finch's paintings, as well as to the paintings of French artists, we cannot but admire the determination and uniqueness of Mägi's creative quest and his extraordinary sense of colour.

Curator of the exhibition: Tiina Abel Assistant curator: Liisa Kaljula

May 21 – September 5, 2010, Kumu Art Museum, Courtyard 
Professor Eero Hiironen (b 1938) holds a prominent place in Finnish art history as one of the most productive sculptors of all time. Hiironen has participated in numerous exhibitions, with a total of 500 works, and has completed 40 monuments. The exhibition "The Dialogue of Earth and Water" in the Kumu courtyard gives a memorable overview of Hiironen's works in various scales and techniques.

Curator of the exhibition: Eha Komissarov

May 14 – October 10, 2010, Kumu Art Museum, Contemporary art gallery 
The exhibition has grown out of the fact that painting continues to be the most popular art medium in Estonia: professionals, outsiders and art lovers are all involved. This flood of painting is not regulated by any norms, since the different subcultures cultivate their personal painting codes. The galleries that operate alongside them have generated the production of a large number of beautiful paintings during the last 10 years, but one cannot say that the Estonian art market has determined developments in Estonian painting. There are a lot of paintings, there is a lot of talk about painting, and from time to time a need develops for an overview. The exhibition Painting in Process is intended to inform the public, and it focuses on introducing the possibilities of contemporary painting.

Curator of the exhibition: Eha Komissarov

April 30 – August 8, 2010, Kumu Art Museum, Great Hall 
The exhibition in the Kumu Great Hall gives an overview of the oeuvre of Mikalojus Konstantinas Čiurlionis (1875–1911), the great master of Lithuanian art. The works of art come from the M. K. Čiurlionis National Art Museum in Kaunas. This is the first extensive overview exhibition of Čiurlionis's work in Estonia. A few of his original works were displayed in the Art Museum of Estonia as part of the 1983 exhibition of Lithuanian classic paintings; however, this time the exposition includes 55 of his works. The unique artist-symbolist is distinguished by the fact that he was also an outstanding composer, whose musical ideas are reflected in his imaginative visual art.

Curator of the exhibition: Mai Levin

April 8 – September 26, 2010, Kumu Art Museum, 4th floor, B-wing 
The exhibition introduces forgotten or little known works from early Soviet Estonian art, concentrating on the image of "new Soviet femininity", that played important role in Soviet ideology and culture. Our collective memory tends to identify this with representations that carry clear political and ideological messages of Soviet power and gender politics: e.g. women workers and tractor drivers, party functionaries and also peace demonstrators carrying the red flag. But why not include portraits of Soviet Estonian intellectuals and cultural workers? And why exclude images of Estonian women dressed in folk costumes for Song Festivals that continued to take place during the Soviet period? The works of art in this exhibition show that representation of Soviet femininity in Estonian art was heterogeneous and that, in addition to the usual signifiers of a specifically Soviet identity – i.e. women workers and collective farmers, there existed a whole array of other images.

Curators of the exhibition: Katrin Kivimaa (Institute of Art History, Estonian Academy of Arts) and Kädi Talvoja (Art Museum of Estonia)

February 5 – April 25, 2010, Kumu Art Museum, Contemporary art gallery  
The international exhibition of contemporary art has grown out of the Public Preparation event series, which has been focused on the problems of nationalism since 2008. The purpose of the exhibition is to ask critical questions about nationalism here and now, in 21^st century Estonia and Europe. The artists investigate the complex cultural-political process during which nationalistic ideology is transformed into national identity.

Curator of the exhibition: Rael Artel

January 22 – May 30, 2010, Kumu Art Museum, 3rd floor, B-wing 
Anton Starkopf's (1889–1966) oeuvre had a significant impact on the development of Modernist sculpture in Estonia in the 1920s and 1930s. Starkopf introduced novel subject matter and treatment of figure, influenced by German Expressionism, into Estonian sculpture. He was also one of the founders of the first national art school Pallas in Estonia in 1919. Starkopf made an enormous contribution to raising a whole generation of pre-war artists. The exhibition is in the series Classics of the Modernist Era.

Curator of the exhibition: Ahti Seppet