Urmas Lüüs

Urmas Lüüs’ solo exhibition “Man! God Has Created You Out of Nothing, and This is Too Often Felt in Your Case” will open at Tütar Gallery in Tallinn. Having once again produced a large-scale, almost total installation in the vein of Kabakov, bearing a title borrowed from Arvo Valton and recreating the atmosphere inspired by the Catholic cemeteries seen in French villages, Lüüs poses a question that appears again and again in classical art, which has assumed new relevance in our time: “How do you ask the dust?” (John Fante)
Urmas Lüüs is known for his expressive contemporary art, in which various creative identities intersect and overlap. A blacksmith by trade, he has dabbled in performing arts, jewellery, noise music and installations, and taught and written about art. I have a feeling that Lüüs, as an artist, or more broadly as a creator, has always taken delight in situations where he comes off as a bit of an outsider, as though eyeing someone else’s backyard.
Art critics and curators have often associated Urmas Lüüs’ work with neo-materialism. This trend is reflected in the belief that an artistic text is sustained primarily by embodied labour, by the energy inherent in the personal, poetic manipulation of material. Realisation, therefore, is anything but secondary, because thinking itself proceeds through manual search. As such, neo-materialist art seems to irk the neo-platonic idea-centric imagination typical of mainstream post-conceptualism, whereby it makes no difference whether an artist realises their project themselves or hires diligent craftsmen from a remote Chinese manufactory. At the broadest level, however, it implies a conscious rejection of the dominant operating models of both the industrial production society and the service-based information society, without becoming obsessed with nostalgia and craftsmanship. Lüüs uses traditional techniques, from embroidery to blacksmithing, but often in unusual, skewed contexts, so as to open up unique registers of manual thinking.
It’s more than refreshing to see contemporary art offer the opportunity to take the Bible off the shelf and trace the lines of Ecclesiastes to deliver a sermon: “Utterly meaningless! Everything is meaningless, a chasing after the wind.” Humour aside, the jauntily pessimistic effect of Lüüs’ new installation is an escape route from the ever more insistent demand to choose sides everywhere and to take to the barricades to make ourselves heard. This conviction, which increasingly oppresses contemporary cultural consciousness through intensifying political crises and which is accompanied by the further exacerbation of the “crisis of subtlety” (Hasso Krull), can in fact only be relativised in the impermeable private space of poetry, without imposing a clear moral on anyone. To paraphrase the artist himself: “plurality is acceptable because evil does not invalidate bad and bad does not negate good.”
As Lutheran heirs to the ‘Danse Macabre’, it is easy for us to embrace the thoroughly democratic message of Notke’s painting, declaring all men equal before death—kings and beggars alike. In the world of kitsch Catholic votive offerings that has fascinated Lüüs in this case, things seem more complicated. The smaller works displayed in the installation appear to be characterised by sacramentality – the invisible and spiritual is present through the visible and material, which in turn is made sacred by its presence. In view of this, it seems fair to ask: who dares to claim that “no man brings souvenirs from beyond the grave”? (Gennadi S. Klein)
I would like to conclude with Anders Härm’s words about Lüüs’ (and Hans-Otto Ojaste’s) previous exhibition: “In a total installation, you must surrender yourself completely, leaving you no choice but to see the exhibition yourself.” Which was, of course, the point all along.
Accompanying text: Hanno Soans 
Design: Juss Heinsalu 
Graphic Design: Cristopher Siniväli 
Technical Solution: Hans-Otto Ojaste 
Installation Support: Erkki Kadarik
The exhibition is supported by the Cultural Endowment of Estonia, City of Tallinn and Koch Brewery

Urmas Lüüs “Man! God Has Created You Out of Nothing, and This is Too Often Felt in Your Case”

Kristina Õllek

Standing in the sea, with rolling waves caressing our feet, carrying sand back and forth between the shoreline and the murky waters, we are standing in the deep past. A past that wasn’t divided into years, days, hours and minutes by calendars and clocks, but flowed in an endless multitemporal current. A past that witnessed abundant and long-gone life forms and materials that have become the fuel for the present and the catastrophes of the future.
Through photographic works and installations combining limestone, sea salt, clay and bioplastics, Õllek has created a bridge between the present moment and the biodiverse equatorial and tropical past of the local seabed. She has exposed the geological time of the Baltic Sea – the stories of which are narrated by crinoids, tabulata, trilobites, brachiopods, cephalopods, cyanobacteria and other fossilised ghosts of the ancient marine life. While we mostly associate cyanobacteria with the toxic blue-green algae that keeps us from having a swim in bodies of water, these bacteria have witnessed the billions of years of evolution and progress while remaining almost unchanged themselves. 
The sea remembers.
Õllek is thinking with the sea: its past, present and future, marine life, bacteria and minerals, to tell the story of how cyanobacteria, while so integral to the oxygen cycle, have transformed into suffocating toxicity through intensive agriculture, fertiliser runoff and pollution, as well as due to the slow water exchange in the Baltic Sea and rising sea temperatures. This all leads to hypoxic zones where oxygen is depleted and biodiversity is lost. The slow violence, almost invisible to the eye, which first affects the weakest life forms, has escalated to the point where it can no longer be ignored. 
The sea is suffocating.
The underlying research on marine ecology and anthropocentric influences, both in the context of the North Sea and the Baltic Sea, is rooted in Õllek’s interest in the relationship between new technologies and extractivist thinking, including the controversial issue of deep-sea mining. The sea echoes humanity’s desires and fears: standing in the sea, we are simultaneously standing in the deep past of tropical waters once teeming with life and in the deep future of waters asphyxiated by toxic capitalism.
Annika Toots, September 2023

Kristina Õllek “Waters of Hypoxic & Once Tropic”

Anna Mari Liivrand

At the exhibition “In the Shadow of Crumbling Silhouettes”, Anna Mari Liivrand continues creating her own unique space, which offers the author and the viewer the change to withdraw from the merciless speed of the modern life, take time out to think and experience an unusual introspection. The artist, who is interested in rituals, leads the visitor to her exhibition that is not emphatically solemn like a religious service, but mundanely discreet and charmingly direct, at the same time capturing our world and the various aspects of life in a very natural way, and showing us their hidden, sometimes contradictory harmony.
The ritual aspect of Anna Mari Liivrand’s work relies heavily on the inherent ornamentality of her work, which structures and guides the visual and symbolic narrative, and in turn, the viewer’s experience of it. Liivrand uses both abstract geometric forms and more realistic motifs borrowed from nature and material culture – recognisable, yet still symbolic – as parts of the ornaments. She takes a hubrid approach to them, interweaving the logic of the organic and non-organic worlds, where a sculptural plant is juxtaposed with a sculpture in the shape of a plant. The way in which Liivrand deals with art media, materials and techniques is also hybrid: sometimes, components that are rather heterogeneous are subordinated to the creation of a single holistic image.
Unlike a traditional ornament built on recurring elements, however, the structures created by Liivrand evolve in a non-repetitive manner, their regularity is more complex and meaningful than historical decorative patterns. In contrast to the context in which traditional ornaments originated – the cyclical world view of archaic society – this branching is well suited to a way of thinking that spreads in different directions and synthesises fragments into a whole from fragments, as if in a rhizome of the modern world.
Like a traditional ornament, however, Anna Mari Liivrand’s compositions are symbolically charged, combining both universal and personal symbols: daisies that mutated as a result of the Fukushima nuclear catastrophe; poisonous plants, such as cow parsnip, lily of the valley, true lover&#8217;’s knot, deceptively seductive in their beauty; vaults resembling ruins and fragments of a metal fence surrounding a grave; wishing ribbons and motifs from Estonian folk poetry craft that have been left unfinished as patterns; toad spawn braided into strings that look like rosaries and tears running like the resin of pines. All these symbols speak at once of fading and rebirth, melancholy and hope. Flowers turning into berries and the frog spawn that gives birth to an amphibious animal are associated with transformation and metamorphosis, the final fruit of which is not yet fully clear. This new fabric is still evolving, acting as an intriguing ornament within an ornament – an independent structure within a larger ornament.
The exhibition of Anna Mari Liivrand comes across as a quiet space full of potential that does not impose itself, whereby the uncertainty of the outcome does not cause anxiety, but a bright anticipation of something intangible.
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Elnara Taidre, July 2023

Anna Mari Liivrand “In the Shadow of Crumbling Silhouettes”

Katrin Piile

In the practice of searching, I imagine a set of eyes. Moving back and forth, left to right, they scan their surroundings. Another approach might be to lift something, or move objects around the room. Seldomly one smells (unless a hint was given that the object of search is food related), weighs or rubs. Our most reliable partner, the one we turn to at first, is still that pair of eyes.
One search that is engraved in our cultural history was written by Marcel Proust. For several decades, the Frenchman attempted to trace a time that had passed. His fragment about the madeleine is highly referenced material; the perfect quotidian example of involuntary memory, where the taste of the pastry brings him back to his childhood.
A la recherche du temps perdu (or, In Search of Lost Time) is most of all a life’s work. However memorable the description of the madeleine was, the book&#8217;s relevance is more than just that. It is a highly accurate example of the character of searching, which often lacks a finish line. Katrin Piiles artistic practice is in a similar manner an intense dedication to a search that will probably never fully resolve. At Tütar gallery, the artist aims her search towards a moment of pause, a breath of air, of peace and stillness. This is intrinsically connected to the medium of painting, with its connotation to the still life or nature morte.
But nothing is completely still: every inanimate object contains action one way or another: it has a history, is sorted, exhibited and rediscovered. Piile’s exhibition features the active process of creation. Drops and buckets give us a glimpse of the artist’s working methods. I am most intrigued by the restlessness in Katrin Piile’s artistic nature. She seeks confrontation with the medium of photorealistic painting. During this heated, passionate discussion with her own process, the artist inserts imperfections in a hyperrealistic medium. Neatly square-shaped canvasses contain images of wrinkled paper, connected to a wall with various pieces of masking tape. This thorough investigation and self-reflection creates an urgency. It makes the work approachable as well as confident.
If eyes are our trustworthy companion, Piile employs these senses vividly. Through enlarging and depicting, she invites the viewer to join her and take a pause. Another notable technique is the practice of layering and copying. She takes a picture, paints, and paints that new picture once more, from a footstep further away, or a tiny bit to the left. This becomes a pathway of translations. In this exhibition, one finds paintings of wallpaper. This material is often a depiction on its own already (leaves, roses or other patterns), but one that is often rather clumsy and mass produced. I would like to call her method paraphrasing, as nothing is identical. What happens in the space between these images? I find questions towards functional, domestic objects, their multitude of interpretations and the influence of the context on the subject.
In search of Idyll tastes like calmness with a hint of restless maneuvers. It shows us the relation between practice and exhibiting. Katrin Piile presents us with a break, a pause, a moment of rest. This moment is a result of a continuous, never ending (even refusing to!) circle of creation and dialog with a medium. And so she presents the exhibition as a still life.
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Laura De Jaeger, May 2023

Urmas Lüüs “Man! God Has Created You Out of Nothing, and This is Too Often Felt in Your Case”

Past exhibitions

Kristina Õllek “Waters of Hypoxic & Once Tropic”

Anna Mari Liivrand “In the Shadow of Crumbling Silhouettes”

Katrin Piile “In Search of Idyll”