Art exhibition “Traces” brings two Estonian artists to Berlin – for the first time, Mari Roosvalt and Mara Ljutjuk present their work in the German capital. This vernissage is a part of an exhibition series started in autumn 2011, which presents well-sped contemporary artists.
The exhibition opened on 8 April at the Estonian Embassy in Berlin. Interested people, fine wine and good art fits well in a spring evening of the winter-recovered Berlin. Paintings of the two ladies show a colourful palette of an existential trip through key moments of life. These moments are memorised in time as traits, symbolical and emotional highlights in a person’s life journey. Both Roosvalt and Ljutjuk are inspired be these liaisons in life and stories that are told, as well as by these emotional “prime hours”. Some inebriate, some go on a spiritual journey and some start to make art to capture or repeat those galvanised moments. In the case of these two Estonian painters, lively compositions are created and an existential story is told – not in a heavy, depressive, world-weariness way, but with female elegance and joy of life.
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Mari Roosvalt (born in 1945) is a key figure in her generation of abstract painters and a professor at the Estonian Academy of Arts. She is interested in a picturesque and colourful painting style. The pictorial wholeness is often intervened by fractures and patterns. Her romantic, poetic work is a complex reflection of the outer emotions and the synthesis of the artist’s inner feelings. Since Roosvalt has travelled around the world, her work also shows strong multicultural tendencies.
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Mara Ljutjuk (born in 1978) is among the most distinctive Estonian figurative painters of her generation. Ljutjuk’s work is dominated by figurative-minimal self-expression. Main themes of her oeuvre are human relations and the inner monologue of the human spirit. Her paintings show temporary events, fragments and usual life moments. She sketches these events as repeated actions, as circular movement through mistakes and hope. Studied in Paris and Valencia, Ljutjuk also brings in foreign influences.
