Minimal

The birth of minimalism is considered to be the beginning of the 20th century, when the adaptation to the modernist syndrome of progress and the spiritual demand to “jump over” the powerlines of the machinery of that era became the basis for the endeavor of the phenomenological absolute. The black icon of minimalism: square as an absolute emptiness and chaos, containing the universe, is a positive counterpart to the nihilistic ultimate goal of the modernism. In the course of cyclical art developments, the style vigorously re-emerged in American art of the 1960s and 1970s. Inspired by constructivism; from the preliminary projects of Kazimir Malevich, De Stijli´ and Marcel Duchamp, minimalist artists brought the narratives of abstract expressionism back to purely self-referential geometric forms. Emptyed from external references, in the second half of the 20th century the direct formal presence of an art object came to the fore – the physical properties of the work, the relationship with the surroundings and the cognitive experience of the viewer became primary.

Today’s Estonian minimalist painting has both formal and substantive features of minimalism; the solipsistic spiritual vector, the feeling of slowing down, stopping and jumping over time, and the refined aesthetic approach in the formulation of the message are constantly present here. Much based on aesthetic as on the philosophical principles makes Estonian minimalism a deeply spiritually enjoyable experience.

Exhibition takes a look at four different authors, allowing the viewer to delve into the depths of “laconicism”, to assume the initial impulses of art style rhetorics, its basic structures; to perceive the slowly working meditative and tuning effect of the works.

PILLE ERNESAKS

ANDRES KOORT

MALL PARIS

TIINA TAMMETALU

Curator of the exhibition: Tiiu Rebane