Gerda Hansen, Jane Muts and Mari Steinberg opened their exhibition Etudes For Blue, Red And Brown in Hobusepea gallery on July 12, 2023. The curator of the exhibition is Aleksander Metsamärt. Exhibition will be open until August 7, 2023.
In a good etude form and content are balanced — in the best case, they are harmonious. When the three artists plotted their first co-exhibition, the plan was also balanced and harmonious. The theme was three colors, and in the middle there would be a big collaborative work — the melding of three different artistic languages on one giant canvas, modeled in the artists’ favourite colors: blue, red and brown. But plans are made to fail! Their time together in university ended. Lives grew apart. It turns out that artistic languages also grow apart when practicing in separate studios. The collaboration never bore fruit. But the idea kept on breathing down their necks. And the colors, those rascals, kept on haunting.
Etudes For Blue, Red And Brown ties a knot, made of color and painting formalities, around the professional friendship and love between the three artists. How do embodiments of space and bodies in space share space? How do non-bodies that find themselves in non-places relate to them? Can songs in three different languages sound together if they are connected by a three-bar rhythm: “Blue, red, brown. Blue, red, brown…”?
The co-exhibition of Gerda Hansen, Jane Muts and Mari Steinberg, Etudes For Blue, Red And Brown, is a balance exercise in three artistic languages and on two floors in Hobusepea gallery.
Gerda Hansen (1994) graduated from the Estonian Academy of Arts with a degree in Painting (2022) and is currently studying in the Contemporary Art MA programme. Deploying traditional oil and acrylic painting techniques, she depicts utopian images of unattainable worlds located outside of familiar perceptual experiences. These environments consist of recognisable images, but they incorporate a certain shift or incongruity.
Jane Muts (1984) graduated from the Estonian Academy of Arts with a degree in Painting (2022). In her works, Muts mainly depicts space within space. She treats paint as a building material, and creates an illusion of space through the use of composition. Thick layers of pigment gradually applied to the canvas create rich textured surfaces, resulting in scenes of interiors that challenge the perception of space.
Mari Steinberg (1984) graduated from the Estonian Academy of Arts with a degree in Painting (2022). Steinberg is currently studying in the Contemporary Art MA programme at the Estonian Academy of Arts. In her paintings she deals with emotional landscapes. The artist describes the starting point of her work as an irreconcilable situation with the monochromatic perception of everyday. Her large-scale paintings can be interpreted as sacred altars to the portraits of the soul
Supported by the Cultural Endowment of Estonia.
Exhibitions in Hobusepea gallery are supported by the Cultural Endowment of Estonia, Estonian Ministry of Culture and Liviko Ltd.
Exhibition by Gerda Hansen, Jane Muts and Mari Steinberg
Curator Aleksander Metsamärt
Title: Etudes For Blue, Red And Brown
Open: 12.07.-7.08.2022
Hobusepea Gallery, Hobusepea 2, Tallinn.
Wed-Mon 11.00-18.00
Photography: Anna Mari Liivrand
