The Pärnu Art Summer is a festival with great traditions. The first Art Summer was held in 1995 and since then many of the great figures in the Estonian art world have participated. Five years ago two new, and more international, exhibition series called Woman&Woman and Man&Man were created under the auspices of the Pärnu Art Summer. The curators, Marian and Jan Leo Grau, sought to combine the body and beach culture of the summer resort town with a legendary exhibition of nudes to create a format that would provide a broader scope of nude art and various points of view related to gender issues. Over the years, Man&Man and Woman&Woman have tried to deal with the positions of men and women in contemporary society. This year’s exhibitions follow a very different path. Man&Man takes a look at contemporary Spanish and French photographic art with which the works of two local artists, Peeter Allik and Valdek Lauri, enter into a dialogue. While Woman&Woman takes a look at the past, and presents a selection of works by the Estonian female artists of the 1970s-1980s.
MAN&MAN: 21st Century Archetypes
Participating artists: Alvaro Sola & Ivan Dumont, Naro Pinosa, Nihil & Leoncio Harmr, Peeter Allik, Valdek Laur
Curator: Jan Leo Grau
As in previous years, Man&Man focuses on the position of men in modern society and seeks to find possible interpretations for 21st century masculinity, i.e. a phenomenon that is constantly changing in time and space, and is saturated with various layers of meaning.
The Spanish collage artist Naro Pinosa works mostly in the field of digital art. His Instagram feed, where he generates his virtual works, which have been cast into material form for this exhibition, has attracted a great deal of attention. In Pinosa’s works, familiar portraits of men from the canons of art history are combined, and have been exchanged for modern “ideals of beauty,” thereby raising questions about changing masculine values.
Similarly, Alvaro Sola, a performer and musician from Spain, has also set out to reform flamenco, which has had strict gender roles, i.e. the women dance and sing while the men usually play the instruments. Ivan Dumont’s photographs of Alvaro Sola document the effort to raise questions of equality and to modernise flamenco through visuals as well as music.
Nihil & Leoncio Harmr reveal the darker sides of masculinity and discuss the male subconscious and archetypes related to masculinity. Peeter Allik’s works, which express primal domestic macho power by using his characteristic irony, enter into a dialogue with the aforementioned, as well as with The Cosmetics of Masculinity, Valdek Lauri’s Estonian Academy of Arts thesis, which deals with masculinity as a cosmetic caricature, something it has unfortunately become in the modern world. Valdek Laur investigates what masculinity is and what all the males who do not meet this ideal of masculinity should do.
Exhibition opening: 21 June at 3 pm.
Exhibition sponsors: Cultural Endowment of Estonia and Pärnu City Government
