Shimmering star Magenta. Was it a dream or was it real?

Kristi Kongi (born 1985) is a painter and installation artist whose work focuses on colour, light, and space. Her bright coloured paintings often take the form of impressive installations created for specific settings. Besides painting on canvas, plywood, walls, floors and ceilings, she also uses various coloured materials such as fabric and acrylic plastic to create her painting installations.

Specific places that the artist has visited or inhabited, and her observations, emotions and memories are often the basis for her paintings and installations. She likes to create space-in-space situations by transferring those memory-places to the exhibition space using her own transformation systems. These arise from painting experiments where Kristi tests different questions related to colour, light and shade. Kristi has named those experiments “Exercises With the Moon” – an example of the poetic titles that her paintings and installations often bear.

Kristi Kongi studied painting at Tartu Art College (BA, 2004–2008) and the Estonian Academy of Arts painting department (MA, 2008–2011). She has been awarded the Young Artist Prize (2011), Sadolin Art Prize (2013), Konrad Mägi Prize (2017) and been nominated for the Köler Prize (2016). She is an associate professor in the painting department at the Estonian Academy of Arts.