On Sunday, April 12 at 14:00, the finissage of Mihkel Maripuu’s solo exhibition “ALTERIX” will take place. As part of the event, the artist will lead a tour and engage in a conversation on themes emerging from his work with art historian Andrus Laansalu. The event will be held in Estonian and is free of charge for all visitors.
Andrus Laansalu notes in the exhibition text: “Humans have always had serious problems with the unfamiliar other. Anyone who is not unequivocally myself is that unfamiliar other. Of course, the other is by no means always dangerous. But sometimes they are. Sometimes we realize it. Sometimes we don’t. And then it is usually already too late to correct anything. All those frightening experiences accumulated over countless generations live within us like the echo of a collapsing load-bearing framework. We know when it begins to happen.
Perhaps, when looking at Mihkel Maripuu’s paintings, one could learn the other side of the experience of being, how not to let our evolutionary fears poison an encounter with the unfamiliar other. There are countless different patterns of encounter for communicating with unknown life forms. Every unfamiliar other can teach us some new method. What seems to us like an organoid proliferation is, for another being, a landscape, and for yet another, a memory of ancestors. Let us think about that.”
Mihkel Maripuu (1987) is an artist examining the evolution of visual language in the digital era, addressing its impact on contemporary aesthetics and materiality. His practice interrogates the shifting dynamics between technological systems and organic worlds, tracing moments where the two collapse into one another. Through compressed, multi-layered, and at times aggressively rendered compositions, Maripuu constructs environments in-which digital logic glitches into painterly materiality, creating a space of tension, resistance and reinvention. Through a dynamic, boundary-pushing practice, he defines the intersections between the illusory and material in contemporary art.
