Indrek Aava’s exhibition 'Kaleidoscope of Home' brings together the artist’s latest works, which exude the scent of fresh paint, but the content of which is timeless, focusing on themes of home that touch us all endlessly.

The exhibition of works with the titles ‘Warmth of the Home’, ‘Sunday Morning’, ‘Silent Night’, and many others, create interpretations of the world bearing the author’s own surreal touch.

Aava wants to show things differently. Represented at the exhibition are moments from a dinner table to a cosy corner of a room, from facades to roofs, and the light of the evening to the morning sun, inverting visible angles and bending reality. The work ‘Lamp Pear’ depicts fruit hanging from the ceiling, out of which someone has taken a tasty bite.

The artist reconstructs and reinvents the traditional notions of space and the life within it, which, when viewed through a kaleidoscope, changes reality and allows the brain to see things as they might be seen... It is Aava’s wish to free the world from the traditional rules and concepts limiting imagination. In this way, for example, the author has replaced draped a canvas over geometric shapes referring to an indefinite spacetime, which, with a kaleidoscopic effect, reorganises the structures of space, adding parallel layers to it that seem to come from somewhere else.

In Indrek Aava’s world, hyperrealism and surrealism actually mix. His sense of form is that of an old master, in terms of both composition and technique, where every contour and volume of shape is realistically and meticulously in place as a result of time-consuming work. At the same time, the artist creates completely irrational spaces in his paintings through the use of inverted compositions and the exaggerated or reduced proportions of various objects – skies in a living room with mysteriously floating clouds, a house on the kitchen table, fruit in a mathematical world of cubes, or light from non-existent sources – in the world of Aava’s paintings, everything seems possible.

As a contemporary artist with a profoundly contemporary sensibility, Indrek Aava (1977) has chosen the path of the old masters, to demonstrate the eternally captivating nature of painting techniques. He uses traditional oil paints as his medium. With almost invisible brushstrokes, he creates compositions that are technically hyper-realistic, yet also surreal. Indrek Aava began to work seriously with painting in 2005, in Finland, where he studied advertising graphic design. Aava has been participating in exhibitions since 2009. His works are part of private collections in Estonia and elsewhere around the world: in Finland, France, Spain, Belgium, Sweden, China, Russia, and Italy.

Curator: Piia Ausman

Text: Piia Ausman and Pia Pajus