Press Materials 2018

December 19, 2018–May 12, 2019, Kumu Art Museum 
The exhibition focusses on the most recent oeuvre of Agathe Veeber, who graduated from the Pallas Art School as a graphic artist and moved to the United States after World War II. Materials found in archives help us comprehend the difficulties and challenges of living as an expatriate.

Curator: Anne Untera

November 22, 2018–January 27, 2019, State Tretyakov Gallery 

November 2, 2018–April 14, 2019, Kumu Art Museum 
The key concept of the 1990s is cultural discontinuation, the replacement of well-established customs and objectives with new ones. The exhibition takes an investigative approach to the art history of the era, examining some of its less-known and ignored aspects. The X-files interact with the hidden backstage of the decade, from which many new ideas sprang.

Curators: Anders Härm and Eha Komissarov

October 21, 2018–January 6, 2019, Le Lieu Unique, Nantes 
Autogeddon. From the Futurists to Detroit, and Back is an exhibition project which focuses on the urbanised and technologised environment with an ambivalent attitude characteristic of the British author J. G. Ballard. The international group exhibition reflects on and maps the processes related to technologisation and automatisation in the modern society based on the work of 12 artists, and looks at how these processes are manifested in the visual culture and art. Most of the exhibits are new productions by artists and primarily fall into the installation genre. This viewpoint is central in the oeuvre of a number of Estonian and foreign artists, who could and should be involved in this project: Katja Novitskova, Karel Koplimets, Ivar Veermäe Guan Xiao, Jon Rafman, Avary Singer and others.

October 12, 2018–February 3, 2019, Kumu Art Museum 
The international exhibition is the fruit of collaboration between four museums in the Baltics: the Latvian National Museum of Art; the Art Museum of Estonia; the Lithuanian Art Museum, and the M. K. Čiurlionis National Art Museum. The main curator of the exhibition is Rodolphe Rapetti, a distinguished researcher of symbolism.
According to Rapetti, by using elements related to agriculture, folklore and landscape, the artists of the Baltic countries were able to create a totally unique artistic phenomenon. The three main themes of the exhibition – “Myths and Legends”, “Soul” and “Landscape” – express the artists’ enthusiasm for romantic stories, the individual inner worlds of people, and the mystery of nature.

Curators: Rodolphe Rapetti, Liis Pählapuu

September 14, 2018 – February 24, 2019, Kumu Art Museum
The largest ever retrospective of the pioneer of Estonian kinetic and sound art looks at Kaarel Kurismaa’s oeuvre in its diverse entirety. You can see light and sound installations, animated films and objects created for public spaces.

Curators: Ragne Soosalu and Annika Räim

August 24, 2018 – March 24, 2019, Kumu Art Museum 
The exhibition of landscape paintings by Konrad Mägi (1878–1925) at Kumu Art Museum displays more than forty paintings from the artist’s various creative periods, with a focus on his dramatic pieces of intense colours and sensitivity to nature.
Konrad Mägi, who grew up near the ancient forests of south Estonia, always viewed painting as an attempt to penetrate the secret and mystical forces of nature. For him, both nature and capturing it on canvas offered nearly sacred experiences, as the artist, who was extremely sensitive by nature, was always looking for a way to contact the unreal. “There are two paths for art to embrace life,” he once wrote. “The convenient path is that of the mind, which embraces life only in its randomness, in its sad and foolish routineness. The steep path leading over abysses is the path of the soul, for whom life is a deep sleep and a tormenting premonition of different relationships and different depths than the ones our pathetic minds are capable of penetrating.”

Curator: Eero Epner

July 6 – October 14, 2018, Kumu Art Museum 
A continuation of the group exhibition held at the Bozar, Brussels, in 2017, which includes Estonian artists’ works supplemented by international examples. Artists from different generations examine the relationships between the screen and art before and after the dawn of the computer age.

Curators: Eha Komissarov and Triin Tulgiste

June 8–September 16, 2018, Kumu Art Museum 
In 2018, the Art Museum of Estonia, in collaboration with the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC, is organising a large-scale exhibition on Michel Sittow (ca 1469–1525), a painter from Estonia who became a sought-after and highly renowned artist in the royal courts of Europe at the turn of the 15th and 16th centuries.
The acclaimed master had been forgotten for centuries when documents found in the Tallinn city archives identified this historical individual a few decades ago. Now, nearly 500 years after his death, his first solo exhibition is being organised.
Today, experts on Netherlandish art highly value Michel Sittow’s paintings, which are exquisitely executed. His oeuvre, which covers a period of about twenty years, is scattered among famous museums around the world: the Louvre, the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, the Gemäldegalerie in Berlin, the National Galleries in London and Washington DC, etc. Several of the master’s paintings have been included in large exhibitions, but until now a solo exhibition of Michel Sittow’s works has never been organised.

Curator: Greta Koppel

May 16–December 19, 2018, Kumu Art Museum 
The sculptors Linda Sõber and Endel Kübarsepp graduated from the Pallas Art School in the late 1930s as students of Anton Starkopf. During World War II, they emigrated from Estonia. The exhibition provides an overview of the oeuvre of these two little-known artists and of their difficult paths.

Curators: Juta Kivimäe and Ulrika Jõemägi

May 11–September 16, 2018, Kumu Art Museum 
The exhibition gets its content from the environment surrounding the museum. On the one side, there is Kadriorg Park, with its Baroque legacy, and on the other, the brutal concrete housing estate of Lasnamägi. The artists have not only looked at what is, but also at what could be, if the storyline came from one of Alice’s adventures in Wonderland.

Curator: Kati Ilves

April 20–August 26, 2018, Kumu Art Museum 
There are different kinds of history. Through prize-winning works of art, we follow the growth of a large joint exhibition of the Baltic countries into an international post-printmaking event. The exhibition is organised in collaboration with the Foundation Tallinn Print Triennial.

Curators: Eha Komissarov and Elnara Taidre

March 16–August 5, 2018, Kumu Art Museum 
Our ideas about history are often based on certain images. Historical images not only tell us about the depicted past, but also about the time of their creation. This exhibition analyses the role of visual culture in the construction of Estonian historical memory

Curators: Tiina-Mall Kreem (Art Museum of Estonia) and Linda Kaljundi (Tallinn University)

February 23–June 10, 2018, Kumu Art Museum 
The exhibition takes the visitor into the world of living machines, patterns imprisoned in synthetic materials, and two-dimensional sculptures of genetically modified life forms, with the daring typical to the dystopian realm. Katja Novitskova’s oeuvre is located at the crossroads of visual culture, digital technologies and speculative fiction: she is interested in how the rapidly developing planet is increasingly more dependent on various data flows, which intermediate, preserve and alter the environment that surrounds us in visual form. The display is an immersive environment interpreting and looking back at the current day from the future, where the world as we know it is no longer recognisable.

Curator: Kati Ilves

February 8 - May 15, 2018, Kumu Art Museum  
Leonhard Lapin has been active in the art scene for 50 years and is considered one of the founders of Estonian pop art and a classic of the neo-avant-garde. His oeuvre stretches from graphic art and painting to installation and performance, from architectural criticism and essays on art to poetry. The exhibition provides an overview of the various stages of his career.

Curator: Sirje Helme

January 17 - May 6, 2018, Kumu Art Museum 
The increasing role of poster art in the 1980s’ art scene in Estonia was accompanied by experiments with printing techniques and artistic styles. The poster entered into dialogue with other types of art and introduced a number of innovative techniques into visual culture. Cultural posters in particular were characterised by ambivalent imagery, while photography was the dominant medium used by designers. On occasion, the design of the poster did not really match the content or title of the advertised cultural event, instead circumventing the requirements set on the poster as an informative medium, so that posters became works of art themselves.

Curator: Madli Mihkelson