The artist has returned to the techniques of the early days of photography, intentionally taking part in the old struggle for photography’s right to be a high art medium: to be both graphic and painterly. To do so, the immediate documentary nature of the photographic medium and the sharpness of the image must be overcome. His prints prove that reportage can become pastoral once the sharpness of the photograph is abandoned.
Maidla’s work is based on the principle that photography has always wanted to become lines. A photograph, whether a collection of silver salts or a set of pixels, must be stretched into a maze of lines. Perhaps it is this unconscious obsession that causes the recurrence in his work of branch ridges and neglected backyards: places where the measured rectilinearity of the careful host has disappeared, where vegetation flows freely and were buildings branch organically.
Ove Maidla (b. 1959) is a freelance artist and photographer who has previously worked as a press photographer and cameraman. A selection of his photographs in broom oil have been published in the author’s collection “Broom Oil Prints”. Together with Enriko Talvistu, he has co-authored several albums documenting Tartu’s urban space. Ove Maidla has taken part in a couple of dozen solo exhibitions and has won several awards as a photographer and press photographer. Maidla has previously exhibited at Tartu Art House with his exhibition “Photogravures” (2015) and his lino-cut printmaking exhibition “Spring of the Last Thunders of the Birth of Thoughts” (2020).
The exhibition is supported by the Cultural Endowment of Estonia and the Cultural Endowment of Tartu.
