Hangar-7

Konstantinas Bogdanas (*1961)

Konstantinas Bogdanas evolved from a painter into a concept artist. He works with witty comments and conceptual wordplays that take no explicit form and are reminiscent of the working methods of Lawrence Weiner and the Art & Language and General Idea artists' collectives.

For this exhibition, the artist has affixed the inscription "Reverse" to the Hangar-7 glass facade. It was stuck to the inside of the building and can be read from the outside in a mirror image. The work is a reference to his long-term project of scrutinizing his own artistic status and, at the same time, asserting himself at a higher level as an "artist" – a clear, deliberate contradiction in itself.

Andris Eglītis (*1981)

For many years, Andris Eglītis has devoted himself to precisely observing his environment. Focusing initially on the interior areas of his living and working environment and city street scenarios, which are meticulously shown in his painting, his interest has recently shifted towards the countryside and landscape painting with a color palette that corresponds to this environment.

In Eglītis' new pictures, the colors of the earth – shades of slate, brown, somber olive green, misty gray – reach into the sky, so that the horizon and thus the traditional structure of the picture are lost.

Merike Estna (*1980)

Merike Estna's paintings impress because of their very virtuoso, expressively moving brush strokes that give the pictures an expressive, abstract character. Sometimes, at least in those paintings that are recognizably landscapes, the trees, horizon lines and topographical shapes become pictorially objective indicators in masses of color that flow, burst forth and entwine.

The artist has developed a style which, in a parallel movement of personal experience and pictorial development, has moved conceptual aspects into the foreground. The painting itself has become the content and the medium for self-questioning.

Daiga Krūze (*1980)

Landscapes and in particular the forest have a particular significance for Daiga Krūze and her visual world. She doesn't need to search online for models or ideas, says the artist herself, because she has all that before her in the forest. The noises and tones of nature make her perceive the color as sound, which she then paints. Sounds of sunrise is thus also one of her picture titles.

The pictures created in this way are only obligated to traditional landscape painting as regards the genre, because these are not artistically structured copies of the landscape. They are better understood as landscape portraits, arising from the interplay of various color sounds.

Inga Meldere (*1979)

Inga Meldere's pictures are a mixture of film snapshots, photographs and illustrations, as if they were taken from a fairy tale. But the scenes of her pictures are not a documentation, nor do they tell a particular story. She is not concerned with describing a situation, but more with examining the connections between the figure and the story, between the artist and the viewer and the theme of the relationships between people.

In Inga Meldere's paintings, pastel shades and bright areas of color mix together to create an original combination, only broken by areas in which the drawing, the form, become more significant.

Alina Melnikova (*1983)

The color red lies like a veil over Alina Melnikova's pictures, sometimes strongly, sometimes just in very delicate traces of color. Revealing the white of the canvas toward the edges, the red color forms figurative details in the center. Forms can be recognized, with large eyes, long eyelashes and heart-shaped lips, some wearing masks, hairs mutating into mushroom-like growths, body parts blurring into organic shapes. It is a surreal setting into which Melnikova's pictures take us.

The artist deals with stereotypes, ideal images, lifestyles and subcultures – with the patterns that a society forms to reduce complexity.

Tõnis Saadoja (*1980)

It is a generally widespread conception that painting is a medium concerned with the colorful, subjective, expressionist and romantic depiction of an object. In the 90-part series Hometown Tallinn (2007-2008), Tõnis Saadoja refutes this view. Inspired by a street painter whom he met each day in the tourist streets of the old medieval city of Tallinn, he created a post-modern, picaresque picture of the Estonian capital that is his home. On the one hand, the work is an internal analysis of the history and theory of Post-War painting, a subject that had been blanked out in the time of the Soviet Union. On the other hand, it is also an attempt to enter into a dialog with a traditional visual language.

Eglė Ulčickaitė (*1989)

Eglė Ulčickaitė's nostalgic pictures seem like winter landscapes. Perhaps because longing and winter are such good companions, her works seem complete in their melancholy simplicity. This nostalgic mood is accompanied by a glimpse into the past, which, for the artist, mainly means family and childhood memories. The alleged recall of events that she does not know and tries to understand also shapes her visual concepts.

Her pastel-colored images do not simply follow minimalist concepts. Ulčickaitė adds vitality to the scenes with just a few elements which, in turn, emphasize the feeling of nostalgia.

Andris Vitolinš (*1975)

He is fascinated by humanity, writes Andris Vitolinš. And yet he paints objects created by human hands, rather than people. His preferred motifs are industrial landscapes and technical objects: diagrammatic factory buildings, piping entwined into an infinite labyrinth, revealed building structures, oil pumps, cars.

Vitolinš photographs houses and objects that he encounters on his travels and in everyday life, and researches their history.

In the painting process, the objects are artistically shaped and are given a new face. Only on close observation can the original photograph still be seen.

Andrius Zakarauskas (*1982)

The sliced, layered pictorial surfaces of Andrius Zakarauskas look like painted collages or sections from pictures that have been fragmented and put back together again. They often show parts of figures and objects that make us think of figurative paintings in the traditional perception of images. Only the visual logic of the complete image shifts the perceptual boundary from the representational zone into that area that makes the pictures seem ambiguous. The application of color, the composition, the omissions, the brushstrokes and even the titles become symbols which turn the surface of the picture into a text area.