Exhibition > Present > Haus Gallery

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Haus Gallery 21.11.2022

TIME GREETINGS

Tallinn and Tartu have still created opposing or comparable artistic communities. The history of art education is remarkably pro-Tartu, as the Pallas School of Art, founded in this city in 1919, has set the tone and impetus for the development of Estonian professional art education in general. Later, artistic life concentrated more in the capital, painting styles and artists' handwriting began to differ significantly. However, for some reason, Tartu is still marked when a great creator is from this city or lives and works there - while Tallinn has not been emphasized as much. Tartu is and will remain special with its intellectual spirituality to such an extent that it is as if dutifully accompanying artists and celebrating something important.

So, Enn Tegova is an artist from Tartu who studied at the art office of the University of Tartu, then at the Tartu Art School, was a member of the legendary Tartu art group Visarid, was an advisor to the Tartu branch of the Artists' Union, the director of the Tartu Children's Art School, and later studied painting and painting restoration at the Tartu High School of Art. However, with his 75th birthday exhibition, the artist will appear in Tallinn, clearly bringing Tartu`s-philosophical art talks here and being impressively different for the audience in the capital, making the viewer stop in the exhibition hall and become thoughtfully silent, perceiving the captivating magic of his concise painting spaces.

Enn Tegova narrates story after story, taking time to talk and present his undercurrent-rich plots in detail. In the artist's paintings, randomness and reality meet, real things and fantasies, existing moments and their further developments - someone who has briefly entered the studio door and read poems becomes a story in the picture; someone who has plopped down on the floor to sleep quietly becomes a dream; the light that has slipped across the studio space is shaped into a repetition of faces disappearing into the distance; surrealism touches on the strange foreboding characters living on the pages of the subconscious, bringing them into the visible space of independent paintings.

Enn Tegova's works are hints of the artist's memory and consciousness from different moments of his life, from the 1960s to today - from "antique" to modern times - both indirectly and directly. Imposing larger-than-life figures of Greek deities on floor-to-ceiling canvases look at Olympia lying on the gallery walls, as well as a Mayan boy with a mouse, a red lonely sun, a kiss on Toome or an upside-down Marie Under, whose whispers of verses become loud in the viewer's ears, as if consecrating whatever images and creations deep vocation rooms.

Enn Tegova's paintings in the two-floor halls of Haus Gallery open to the viewer one of the most concise interpretations of life's connections and its spheres of perception, with the peace and contemplative pleasure characteristic of a Tartan, without always rushing anywhere.

Curator, Piia Ausman 

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