Jaan Elken
Poverty stinks
| Artist: | Jaan Elken (1954 - ) |
| Title: | Poverty stinks |
| Date: | 1997 |
| Technique: Material: |
oil canvas |
| Height (cm): | 130.0 |
| Width (cm): | 200.0 |
| Description: | A new kind of contact with reality is visible in paintings of this Estonian hyper-realist* from the second half of the 1990s, whose works had during the years taken quite an abstract turn. Elken borrowed slogans from everyday life in a city - both the self-expressions of anonymous authors on the walls of buildings or tunnels and commercial posters (“I was here", “Mother is going to kill us if we don't eat our soup", “Sugar Free") - and wrote them on the surface of a canvas. The originally carefully designed advertising slogans became graffiti-like scribbles. Elken allows the street- and mass-culture to invade abstract painting, confirming vanishing of the border between high and low art. We probably cannot completely ignore the author's generational background and his personal experience of the changing times. Graffiti has lost its once dangerous and anarchistic pathos and is now recording the new world in which economic incompetence is the most shameful of sins: poverty stinks. The world of advertising and media “no longer raises elevated curiosity over closed and forbidden opportunities, /…/ the once exciting slogans on the TV-screen or in magazines, picked-up from somewhere, have now become banal and annoying reality."* Anu Allas * Juta Kivimäe, Jaan Elken's Notes from Reality. - Vikerkaar, 1998, 1-2, p. 56-57. ** Hyper-Realism - movement in art from the end of the 1960s, where reality (often a random fragment from the city environment) was depicted with photographic precision, using strong poster-like colours; the artist's attitude towards the depicted was distinctly neutral. |
| Related categories: | Contemporary Art |
| Copyright notice: | Art Museum of Estonia |
| AME collection: | Paintings collection |
| Collection number: | M 7023 |
| Accretion number: | EKM j 47310 |
| Muis reference | http://muis.ee/museaalView/248277 |
| File info: |
Source type: digital photography File type: TIF File size: 65.79MB Resolution: 5858*3924px @ 300dpi |
