Soft, genderless and refusing to take sole responsibility, In Vanity Alone is like a metaphor for our time. Everything here speaks of the inevitability of coping with intense existence, which Neeme Külm, with his keen and innocent openness, has captured in its hybridity, entangled contexts, apparent arrogance of being ‘deep’ and forgiveness of profound ignorance from the outset. Like the transition of individualism and personality into eternal plurality, the verbose space threatens to spill out of the exhibition space. This is where Alice Kask intervenes. Selectively and with ease, she works on gallery corners, patches them up and closes them by painting. Calmly, as if marking her territory, she pays homage to the corners, which the gallery itself has never done.
Curator Tamara Luuk: “Neeme and Alice both deal with illusion: one as a sentimental romantic striving for the ‘real’ existence, the other as a pragmatist hesitant about everything, aware of the inevitability of being ‘just like the real thing’. But neither of them jokes with art.” The objects at the exhibition, like the lines in a poem, look for equivalents to feelings without obliging the mind to convey them.
Neeme Külm (1974) graduated from the Sculpture Department of the Estonian Academy of Arts in 1998 and studied in the master’s programme at the Department of Interdisciplinary Arts in 2003-2005. He held his most powerful solo exhibitions in the first half of 2010; more recently he has mainly focused on group exhibitions, which traverse the borders of architecture and visual art. He has also created remarkable spatial solutions for public urban space and important museum exhibitions and has received awards from the Cultural Endowment of Estonia.
Alice Kask (1976) graduated from the Estonian Academy of Arts with a master’s degree in painting in 2002. Following a large solo exhibition at the Estonian Museum of Contemporary Art in 2016, her most recent representative exhibitions have been held at Taidehalli in Helsinki (2018) and Rüki Gallery in Viljandi (2020). Kask received the Konrad Mägi Prize in 2003 and the Vaal Gallery Young Artist Prize in 2005.
