Borderless Universe in Their Minds: Italian Transavantgarde and Estonian Calm Expressionism
This ambitious international project is focused on the creative dialogue between works by Italian and Estonian artists in the second half of the 1980s. The exhibition presents the Estonian audience with a representative survey of works from private Italian collections and museums that were created by the Transavantgarde group, which was formed in Italy in the late 1970s. The works are displayed side by side with works by Raoul Kurvitz (1961) and Urmas Muru (1961), who renewed the Estonian art scene in the second half of the 1980s. Although born on the other side of the Iron Curtain, Kurvitz and Muru鈥檚 Calm Expressionism 鈥� as the artists themselves called it 鈥� is like a northern reflection of Italian Transavantgarde.
For the Kumu Art Museum, one of the goals of the exhibition is to draw attention to Estonian painting from the 1980s and its significance in our recent art history. This period in art has also been called the 鈥渓ost decade鈥�. The artistic community kept a certain distance from daily politics during the transition period, and the 1980s were rather uninteresting in art history against the background of the great changes that would follow the restoration of Estonia鈥檚 independence. Therefore, this decade still needs to be seriously studied.
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This ambitious international project is focused on the creative dialogue between works by Italian and Estonian artists in the second half of the 1980s. The exhibition presents the Estonian audience with a representative survey of works from private Italian collections and museums that were created by the Transavantgarde group, which was formed in Italy in the late 1970s. The works are displayed side by side with works by Raoul Kurvitz (1961) and Urmas Muru (1961), who renewed the Estonian art scene in the second half of the 1980s. Although born on the other side of the Iron Curtain, Kurvitz and Muru鈥檚 Calm Expressionism 鈥� as the artists themselves called it 鈥� is like a northern reflection of Italian Transavantgarde.
For the Kumu Art Museum, one of the goals of the exhibition is to draw attention to Estonian painting from the 1980s and its significance in our recent art history. This period in art has also been called the 鈥渓ost decade鈥�. The artistic community kept a certain distance from daily politics during the transition period, and the 1980s were rather uninteresting in art history against the background of the great changes that would follow the restoration of Estonia鈥檚 independence. Therefore, this decade still needs to be seriously studied.
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