Kaarel Liimand

Kaarel Liimandi’s paintings are rarely sold at auction, as the author, who had a great influence on Estonian painting, had a short life and the number of works he produced was therefore small. Above all, the peculiarity of Liimandi’s approach to colour has been recalled, among which the bold introduction of the colour white by Liimandi stood out. Instead of and alongside the brush, Liimand often used a palette knife, and apparently this is also the case in the present work, where we can see wide, even strokes across the surface of the painting. It is an almost entirely abstract work, where the emphasis is on the coordination and fusion of unexpected colours. Liimand did not use the colours carefully and airily, but boldly and massively, thus emphasising the materiality and texture of the colours. In the year of the work’s completion, Liimand had moved to Pallas as a lecturer, but this did not mean fixation; Liimand experimented boldly. There are a number of other paintings from 1935, but none as boldly experimental as this work.