If you choose a high enough vantage point, details disappear, colours collapse and forms melt together. The only thing that remains is the horizon, a vertical division of up and down, conceptions of good and evil, and the great dichotomy between light and darkness. The contrasts of metropolitan airports, where the human made futuristic emptiness of the terminals is followed by a different emptiness when you hit the runway, where the rush of speeding is replaced by transcendental ascension, when you no longer can feel the speed/space/time in an ordinary manner – emerging above the clouds.
My retrospective show has a strong thread of autobiographical elements involved, it also appeals to a more universal human experience with archetypes of landscapes. The white-gray-red „Strawberry Fields Forever“(2012) and „March 25th, Snowy“(2017) series refer to my early years in Siberia, where I was born in 1954 – my parents were deported by russians in 1949.
I try to avoid photorealism characteristic to new age phenomena and monotonous minimalism, but rely on abstract expressionism as a starting point – but still there are at least two paintings, which combine my earlier hyperrealism with abstract surfaces – very personal „Linda. Remix 2001“ (1980/2001) and psychedelic „Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds“ (2001) which refers to the soviet era parallel reality. Thanks to Jaan Manitski, who has obtained „Linda. Remix 2001“ to the museum from Bukowski`s auction house in the fall of 2023.
Jaan Elken (b. 1954) is a painter, art critic (published more than a few hundred articles on art criticism and art policy), curator and art teacher. Have been worked as lecturer at Tallinn University (1987-1988) and Estonian Art Academy (1988-2022), In 1997-2018 he has been working as a professor of Chair of Painting at the University of Tartu Institute of Cultural Research and Fine Art, until its closing, since 2018 he is a Professor Emeritus at the University Tartu Faculty of Arts and Humanities. He has been a member of the Estonian Artists’ Association since 1981, in 1998-1999 working as vice-president and in 1999-2013 as president of the Estonian Artists’ Association.
He started his artist career with hyper-realistic paintings in 1970s and has since become one of the most significant abstract painters in Estonian art.
Acknowledgements: 2020 AkzoNobel Art Prize; 2011 Ado Vabbe Art Award; 2007 Order of the White Star 4th Class; 2006 Kristjan Raud Art Award; 2002 Sadolin Art Award; 2000 Konrad Mägi Art Award; 1979 Young Artists’ Triennale of the Baltic States, Grand Prix by the Lithuanian Ministry of Culture.
Elken has held more than 70 personal exhibitions, including in the Museum of New Art in Pärnu (2009, 2014), Tallinn Art Hall (2005), Tartu Art Museum (2005), Adamson-Eric Museum (2000), in addition to exhibitions in Berlin, Kiev, Helsinki, Riga etc.
He has participated in numerous group exhibitions, including: 2022 Huntenkunst, Ulft, Holland; 2018 “The X-Files [Registry of the Nineties]”, Kumu Art Museum; 2016 “Cold Look. Variation of Hyperrealism in Estonian Art”, Kumu Art Museum; 2009, 2013, 2015 Nord Art, Kunstwerk Carlshütte, Rendsburg/Büdelsdorf (Germany); 2014 “Tallinn S`Invite À Carcassonne”, Chapelle des Jesuites, Carcassonne (France); 2013 “In between zwischen Energie und Materie”, Alte Oberpostdirektion, Hamburg; 2012 “In Between New Abstraction & New Concretion”, Klaipeda Culture Communication Center; 2012 Art Vilnius’12 International contemporary art fair, Lithuanian Exhibition and Congress Centre (Litexpo); 2011 “Mystics and Moderns: Painting in Estonia before Glasnost”, Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, USA etc.
Jaan Elken’s artwork has been acquired by numerous art collections, including Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum, (Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, The Norton and Nancy Dodge Collection of Nonconformist Art from the Soviet Union), CAM_Casoria Contemporary Art Museum (Naples, Italy), the State Tretyakov Gallery (Moscow, Russia), Matthew Bown Gallery (London, UK), European Parliament (Brussels, Belgium), Art Museum of Estonia, Tartu Art Museum, Viinistu Art Museum, Pärnu Museum of New Art and other collections all over the world.
