It is nearly on impossible to match the technical virtuosity of the artist awarded the Konrad Mägi Prize in 2024. Katrin Piile’s finely honed and exceptionally precise language of painting is mostly based on digital photographic imagery and a composition of form and colour abstracted or dislocated to serve a conceptual purpose.

The genre of her latest series of works can be classified as still-life, with cut flowers thrown in a bin. As in stilleven – the symbolic and allegorical still-lifes that flourished in the Netherlands in the 16th and 17th centuries – we can read in the artist’s choice of motifs a critical commentary on today’s global consumer society. Nothing says more about us than the litter we leave behind: things we once valued and fought tooth and claw to obtain, only then to seemingly change our minds and throw them away.

Here then are these still-lifes, these wilting flowers in a black plastic bucket, so symbolic of impermanence. This new series of works was painted on a circular canvas, a rarely used medium which has been known as the tondo form since the Renaissance. In classical architecture, tondi tend to be given a fixed place in a room, but these paintings can be very effectively exhibited on both wall and floor surfaces.

Piile’s paintings are a fine example of decoy images, a truly familiar trompe l’oeil on a two-dimensional canvas surface – a momentary sensation when an optically recognisable image suddenly becomes three-dimensional in the brain, with space and image becoming one. As observers, we instinctively believe that what we are seeing is true, even when our minds tell us that it cannot be. Although trompe l’oeil only entered the vernacular as a word denoting a skill in the 19th century, artists have been striving to achieve its delightful effect since the dawn of time.

If it is super- or hyper-realism that Piile is cultivating, then the use of superlatives is in itself entirely justified; but if it is generalised conceptual photorealism, then the result is in dialogue with the noble traditions of the history of painting.

Katrin Piile graduated from the Estonian Academy of Arts with a degree in painting in 2010, but has been exhibiting her works since 2006. She has been a member of the Estonian Painters’ Association since 2019 and of the Estonian Artists’ Association since 2023. In 2020 she received the art prize awarded by the heirs of Malle Leis, who was renowned as a masterful painter of flowers in her own lifetime. In 2024, Piile was awarded the Konrad Mägi Medal: the oldest and highest form of professional recognition of painters in Estonia, which by its own statutes can only be awarded to an artist once in their lifetime.

Exhibition text: Andreas Trossek
Graphic design: Ott Metusala
Installation support: Erkki Kadarik
Photographic documentation: Stanislav Stepaško and Alana Proosa