Eerik Haamer

Erik Haamer’s oeuvre from Saaremaa is permeated by the notional dialect line ‘before and after’ – ‘before’ means living and painting in his native Estonia, and ‘after’ means living and painting in Sweden, after emigrating there. This colour lithography dates back to the Swedish period, hinted at by the repeated combination of colours blue and yellow.  Laste sünnipäev (Children’s Birthday) is, when viewed from the outside, one nice fun party, a multi-figure family event. However, the picture must be viewed in detail and up close to capture the obvious caricature here.

Erik Haamer had seen the difficult life of Saaremaa in Estonia, how much effort one has to put into earning a living for his family, and he had painted it with a heavy, almost monochrome colour. In the Swedish welfare society, however, the colours are more like candy paper, and as a result of the permissiveness of children, the latter do what they want. It is a post-war Swedish welfare society that was built with effort and is likely to crumble in the current real-time. Erik Haamer is an artist of large-scale themes that rose to prominence in the 1930s, whose monograph (2008) was written by Reeli Kõiv. Nowadays, the Erik Haamer Art Award is awarded annually in Kuressaare.