Dénes Farkas

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On Thursday, November 12th at 6 pm, Dénes Farkas will open his solo exhibition “Herbarium” at Tütar gallery. “Herbarium” will be open until January 10th and is free to the public. The exhibition is supported by the Cultural Endowment of Estonia.

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Exhibition by Dénes Farkas will open in Tütar gallery

Dénes Farkas "Herbarium“

August Sai

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In the Skin of Paint #1 (2025)

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In the Skin of Paint #2 (2025)

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In the Skin of Paint #3 (2025)

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In the Skin of Paint #4 (2026)

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In the Skin of Paint #5 (2026)

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In the Skin of Paint #6 (2026)

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In the Skin of Paint #7 (2026)

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In the Skin of Paint #8 (2026)

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In the Skin of Paint #9 (2026)

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In the Skin of Paint #10 (2026)

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In the Skin of Paint #11 (2026)

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In the Skin of Paint #12 (2026)

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In the Skin of Paint #13 (2026)

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In the Skin of Paint #14 (2026)

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On Thursday, September 10th at 7 pm, August Sai will open his solo exhibition “In the Skin of Paint” at Tütar gallery.Art historian Triin Metsla notes in the exhibition text: “I looked at August’s paintings on the wall and realised that I am completely saturated with different semiotic codes. /…/ August, on the other hand, emphasised that content and art-historical references are not important. They are source material to be manipulated and worked with further. What matters is the formal aspect and technical mastery: to learn from the masters, but then to move beyond them.This is where painting begins for him: the technical process itself becomes the concept. With sufficient humility before history, faith, and morality, he moves onto the technical plane. Through the right pigment, light, magnification, fear, and personal effort, he gets close enough to an old master. Then, suddenly, he stops and destroys it. Pure imitation would be naïve, uncritical, and dull, like academic painting.Perhaps what matters is getting close enough in order to then move away. To get beneath the skin of the painting and then choose one’s own path."August Sai (1983) is a painter whose work is in constant dialogue with the Western pictorial tradition. His paintings often form series that bring together visual references to recurring patterns and conventions in visual culture, which Sai reworks in new ways. Through his particular use of paint and its material qualities, personal experience becomes layered into the work.Sai chooses his subjects primarily for their formal qualities, drawing on images from art history, film stills and staged photographs. He contrasts the illusion of a meticulously painted image with the materiality of the painted surface or the structure of its visual language. This reflects the ambiguity of seeing and the conflict between two pairs of eyes. One pair seems to belong to him alone, while the other looks through the lens of culture and inevitably sees not what is there, but what it believes to be there.August Sai graduated with a BA in Painting from the Estonian Academy of Arts in 2010 and took part in the FLACC Workplace for Visual Artists residency programme in Belgium that same year. His recent solo exhibitions include “The Story of Paint” at Hobusepea Gallery (2020) and “Twenty Cases” at Draakon Gallery (2018).

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Exhibition by August Sai will open in Tütar gallery

Stupidity and meaning are so difficult to tell apart. – Toomas Paul When I met August last week, I was certain that I was the least suitable person to write an accompanying text for his exhibition. There was a book by Peter Sloterdijk on top of his cupboard, he told me about Flannery O’Connor – whose admirer I have been for a long time – and followed it with David Foster Wallace’s famous fish anecdote. Yet he avoided the relationship to religion and Western Christian philosophy, which I had hoped would form the basis of our entire conversation and of this text. August repeatedly stressed the importance of seeing through the neutral eye of nature rather than the eye of culture, without (over)interpreting every symbol, icon, and index. I found myself wondering where one could possibly find a writer without the “cultural” eye. I looked at August’s paintings on the wall and realised that I am completely saturated with different semiotic codes – my undergraduate obsession with the Northern Renaissance, religion, being a quarter-believer, and so on. All that ran through my mind were Christian narratives: Dürer, Luther, Memling, Sittow, etc. August, on the other hand, emphasised that content and art-historical references are secondary, serving primarily as material for further exploration and transformation. His focus lies instead on form and technical mastery: learning from the masters and then moving beyond them. Above all, he is interested in the process itself. August showed me countless pigment tests stored in boxes, along with screens and lighting setups he had developed to study old paintings more closely. I began to see these experiments as a kind of search for truth. Perhaps, before allowing himself to play with historical material, he first needed to pay his respects to it, to quite literally get under its skin. As the conversation went on, however, I began to suspect that he had already resolved the narrative side of his work for himself and simply wasn’t sharing it with me. I trusted my own instincts enough to know that techne could not be the only thing at work here. That same evening, he sent me something by Flannery O’Connor, and I remembered her once describing herself in words to this effect: “I am a Catholic peculiarly possessed of the modern consciousness.” I found myself thinking something similar about August. And skin, somehow, holds it all together. This is where painting begins for him, with the technical process itself becoming the concept. With a certain humility towards history, faith, and morality, he turns to technique. With the right pigment, light, magnification, fear, and his own effort, he gets close enough to an old master. Then, suddenly, he stops and destroys it. Mere imitation would be naïve, uncritical, and dull, like academic painting. Perhaps what matters is getting close enough to then pull away. Getting beneath the skin of the painting before going your own way. But perhaps I am completely wrong. I left in a light drizzle, thinking that I would probably write this text and then let it go. Let the author die, let the text live a life of its own. The main thing is not to do injustice to the artist’s honest method with some elaborate curatorial burst of words that revels in its own beauty, only to wilt by the end of the day like a ditch flower in an elegant designer vase. 18 August 2026 somewhere high above Central Europe Accompanying text: Triin Metsla Graphic design: Ott Metusala

August Sai "In the Skin of Paint"

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Ruudu Ulas “CMYK” (2024)

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Ruudu Ulas “Impact” (2018/2022)

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Anaïs Goupy “Future” (2024)

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Anaïs Goupy “Showy Shell” (2024)

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Līga Spunde “The Sims. A Very Boring Game” (2019)

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Līga Spunde “Gobo” (2021)

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Madlen Hirtentreu “Tombstone on Rolex” (2025)

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Photos: Opening of group exhibition “Safe Traps”

The spring season at Tütar gallery will conclude with “Safe Traps,” an international group exhibition curated by Maria Helen Känd.  The exhibition runs from April 24 to June 21 and features works by Madlen Hirtentreu (Estonia), Ruudu Ulas (Estonia), Liga Spunde (Latvia), and Anaïs Goupy (France).  Photo: Detail from Future by Anaïs Goupy

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International group exhibition “Safe Traps” will open at Tütar gallery

Contemporary Western society is built on the quiet conviction that both the self and the world around us can be managed and regulated. Control promises safety, soothing our fear of the unknown, whereas dependence, entanglement and submission feel oppressive. At the same time, a part of us always remains inaccessible and unconscious. As such, the more we cling to the need for control, the more we rely on conceptions of ourselves and a world that does not actually submit to our will. &#8220;Safe Traps&#8221; invites us to reflect on a different logic: one in which the act of control, and our craving for it, reveals itself as the actual trap and the very mechanism that confines us.
This exhibition brings together works that treat control as a refuge which is as much a cage as it is a stronghold. They operate along a line of tension where allure and a haunting sense of estrangement exist side by side: comfort turns into unease, and familiarity into the uncanny. Whether dealing with digital fantasies, anthropomorphic depictions of nature or polished bodily aesthetics, these constructions reveal their own fragility upon closer inspection, eventually turning against the promise they made.
This double bind is embodied in Līga Spunde’s installation, which draws from the tale of Bambi, its original story and the Disney adaptation, as well as the tradition of trophy photography. Anthropocentric interpretations of nature are often deceptive: wildness and danger are redacted, replaced by a sanitised, friendly vision of animals. Spunde’s work, which is intentionally misleading at first glance, exposes the hostile essence of interspecies relationships. The deer, as the character of Gobo, has been reduced to a lifeless object, yet the human poses as a hero, still believing they prevail over nature and over life and death. In her digital drawing A Very Boring Game, Spunde continues to play with ambivalence, depicting a scene from the world-famous life-simulating game The Sims – an extreme manifestation of control. On the one hand, the game offers a therapeutic escape in which to create an ideal extension of the self, a home and a family. On the other hand, boredom soon ensues in this perfect world, prompting a search for something more thrilling in situations where avatars are pushed to their breaking point. This probing of boundaries and the deliberate self-immolation of the ego resonates beyond the digital realm in the cushioned reality of the West, where radical extremes are sought as a desperate antidote to ennui. This is the final stage of the illusion of control: we manufacture a crisis for ourselves so as to feel like heroes who have, seemingly by choice, relinquished the control they once possessed.
While Spunde’s works critically view nature compressed into the frames of a human-made simulation, Madlen Hirtentreu’s installation serves as a reminder that nature possesses the means to shatter those boundaries. Hirtentreu’s carnivorous plant, descending from the ceiling and adorned with pearls and metallic fangs, embodies one of culture’s most enduring tropes: the monstrous anomaly categorised by humans as the unknown ‘Other’. Such uncanny flora signify a reversal of the natural order – a moment where the edible becomes the eater – looming over the viewer as a silent memento of nature’s untameability. Hirtentreu’s second installation, Tomb on Rolex, marks the collapse of the human order principle; a gravestone has struck a luxury item like a meteorite, crushing a mode of existence built upon contemporary capitalism and conventional timekeeping. Upon closer inspection, the gravestone takes the form of a one-horned rhinoceros. As a species pushed to the brink and surviving only on the island of Java, it stands as a witness to our ecological crisis and the lost futures of the natural world.
The scrutiny of the man-made material world and the disproportionate worth we assign to it continues in the work of Ruudu Ulas, who explores its quiet, persistent instability. In her series Difficult Objects, familiar everyday spaces and objects are ever so slightly warped. Nothing is overtly wrong, yet there is a lingering sense of unease. Ulas frequently adopts an installational approach to her photography, drawing attention to the dialogue between the depicted imagery and the physical interventions within the gallery space. In her two-part work, this subtle dissonance exposes the absurdity of our pursuit of the exclusive or original in a world already defined by repetition and the reproduction of copies. Furthermore, Ulas plays with the core question of photography – the relationship between the real and the staged – introducing another ‘difficult’ sphere: one in which the viewer&#8217;s perception of reality is susceptible to the artist’s intention.
Anaïs Goupy raises similar questions about mediation, authenticity and origin within the context of the digital sphere and social media trends. Goupy focuses on deconstructing the representation of the hegemonic body as a commodified object, confined within the discriminatory frameworks of Western beauty standards. The artist blends the digital and analogue worlds by weaving AI-driven algorithms, fed with specific visual data, into her painterly process. Through this combination of human and machine techniques, trompe-l’œil illusions emerge in which the human body – which is so often the primary outlet for our self-control and an integral part of our self-image – takes on a grotesquely deformed appearance. In these images, the aesthetics of the perfected body remain recognisable, yet they manifest as if in a warped, glitched mirror, emphasising the deceptive nature of the idealised image.
&#8220;Safe Traps&#8221; reflects a society seeking refuge in the superficial and the illusory. We are surrounded by rigid categories, stimulations, simulations and aestheticised environments and bodies that generate a sense of security. By leaning on these constructions, we move ever further from the unpredictable and the natural. As we become dependent on these systems, we begin to reinforce and reproduce them ourselves, thereby giving power to the structures that confine us. In this way, it is revealed that humans are inherently dependent on these and other structures, and that our sense of control is merely a comforting mental trap.
Curator: Maria Helen Känd 
Participating artists: Anaïs Goupy (France), Līga Spunde (Latvia), Madlen Hirtentreu, Ruudu Ulas 
Graphic design: Ott Metusala 
Photographic documentation: Alana Proosa

2026 Tytar Galerii Safe Traps Koduleht 3200x2000px Kavand 16 04 A ENG

Group exhibition “Safe Traps”

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Dénes Farkas "Herbarium“

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Exhibition by Dénes Farkas will open in Tütar gallery

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August Sai "In the Skin of Paint"

Group exhibition “Safe Traps”