Tutar Gallery is pleased to announce its participation at Feria Material 2025 in Mexico City, presenting works by Urmas Lüüs from the exhibition ‘Man! God has created you out of nothing, and this is too often felt in your case’ and paintings by Katrin Piile from the series ‘Idyll’.
Urmas Lüüs’s works focus on the transformation of found materials, using cemetery culture as a starting point. Instead of approaching the theme through the tragedy of the individual, Lüüs takes a much brighter tone: he views leaving this world as a merging with the highest level of collectivity.
Art critic Hanno Soans says that Lüüs raises a question which frequently appeared in classical art but which has regained significance in our time: “How to ask from the fleeting?”[GD1] The smaller works presented in the context of the exhibition are characterized by the principle of sacramentality — the invisible and spiritual are present through the visible and material, which in turn becomes sacred through that presence.
In her painting series “Idyll” Katrin Piile intensively dedicates herself to searches that will likely never reach their destination. In the course of these searches, the artist tries to find and capture a pause, a moment to focus on breathing, silence, and peace. According to art writer Laura De Jaeger, this is inseparably linked to painting, one of whose expressions is the depiction of still life, or nature morte. Yet nothing is ever completely still. Every inanimate object carries some kind of activity within it: it has its own history, it is sorted, exhibited, and rediscovered.
The works presented at the Material Art Fair express the connection between practice and exhibition. Piile gives the viewer a chance to pause and rest, but this pause arises as a result of an unceasing and endless cycle of creation and dialogue with the tools used for painting.
Urmas Lüüs (1987) graduated from the Estonian Academy of Arts in the field of jewelry and blacksmithing (BA 2011, MA 2014). He teaches students at the academy itself, as well as in the Department of Performing Arts at the University of Tartu Viljandi Culture Academy, and in the metal department of the University of Gothenburg. In 2023 he was awarded the grand prize of the Estonian Cultural Endowment for visual and applied arts for his exhibition “The Owl Hooted and the Samovar Hummed Continuously.”
Lüüs focuses on combining blacksmithing, sculpture, light, sound, classical craftsmanship, and material arts in his work. He seeks shared fields that operate as hybrids, creating extensive works that transcend fields and media. He rarely works with individual objects; instead, he is interested in a whole composed of hybrid forms.
Katrin Piile (1987) is a painter whose work also includes objects and installation-based pieces. She graduated in painting from the Estonian Academy of Arts in 2010. She was awarded the Malle Leisi Art Prize in 2020, and is set to receive the Konrad Mägi Prize in 2024.
Piile’s work engages with the technical skills of painting, color composition, the history of painting, and modes of representation. Her paintings are often executed in a hyper-realistic style, seeking a playful way to use shapes in order to approach her chosen technique critically.
The Material Art Fair Vol. 11 will take place from February 6 to 9 at the Reforma Exhibition Center in Mexico City. Tutar Gallery’s exhibition will be located in area B01. The gallery’s participation is being supported by the Estonian Center for Contemporary Art.
Tutar is a contemporary art gallery located in Tallinn, Estonia.
Feria Material is Latin America’s most beloved independent fair, celebrating Mexican and international contemporary art in an incomparable context. Relentlessly innovative, it is an experiential and experimental platform for contemporary art and ideas.
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To view a presentation of the artworks which will be displayed at the fair, please email us at info@tutar.ee.
Photography: Joosep Kivimäe
